The Ring of Truth

What The Tea Party Needs To Learn

2012-01-21T15:09:00.000-08:00

The tea party movement has been one of the most encouraging developments in the political arena for a long time. When I went to my first tea party rally back in 2009, I was struck by a couple of things. One was the number of people present who made comments such as, “I’ve never done anything like this before, but I just felt I had to speak out.” Another notable point was that no elected officials or candidates were invited; it was strictly an event for non-politicians. I was impressed by how peaceful, calm, and sincere it all was. After the speeches from the organizers, we threw bags of tea into the nearby creek (with a string attached so we could pull them back out and not be litterers).

Yes, the tea party types can have a “million man” march on the Mall in Washington with no violence whatsoever, or even any rude behavior to speak of, and then leave the place cleaner than when they arrived. The “Occupiers” can’t even comprehend something like that.

And the tea party has had an impact. Their voice has been heard; they have changed the debate in Washington; some of their candidates have been elected.

One of my favorite “tea party” candidates is Nikki Haley, Governor of South Carolina. I don’t know if she was so much a tea party candidate as a grassroots candidate, but it doesn’t matter. I heard her speak at an event in D.C. not too long ago, and her story is remarkable. When she first ran for a seat in the South Carolina legislature, she defeated a thirty year incumbent in the primary election (for which the local part bosses have never forgiven her) in a true grassroots campaign with no money, no name recognition, but a lot of passion and energy. She went on to win in the general election by the same means. She was then ostracized by the career politicians in the legislature to the point of them not even giving her an office; she had to work in the hallways. The governor also was making life difficult for her, so she decided to run for governor! And she won that one, too. One of her first actions as governor was to put in place a “report card” program where she as governor rated the performance of every member of the legislature, and published the ratings. Don’t you just love it!

In spite of these and other successes, I see the tea party movement now starting to become less effective. This is 2011, not 2009; things have changed. The people still want a new direction for the country, but they aren’t as prone to simply continue going to rallies. A new approach is needed. Anti-establishment fervor is no longer enough. The movement is maturing.

Staging rallies only gets you so far. In order to really have an impact on actual government policies, you have to be able get people elected in this new, more mature, “tea party” era. The tea party needs to move from being reactive with protests and rallies on various issues to being pro-active by getting the right people nominated and elected in the first place so we don’t have to continually pressure them into doing the right thing.

Here’s the problem with accomplishing that. There are only two ways to get someone elected, beyond local elections: 1) Via the Democrat Party, or 2) Via the Republican Party.

Don’t talk to me about a third party. Yes, there are one or two Independents in Congress, but that is the clear exception. No third party candidate has ever been elected President.

Look at some fairly recent history. In the Presidential elections of 1992 and 1996, there was a third party candidate, Ross Perot. People were so fed up with George Bush the elder (of “Read my lips. No new taxes” fame – he raised taxes after saying that) that many people, mostly Republicans, bolted to Perot. In 1992, Perot received 19% of the vote, more than any third party candidate since Teddy Roosevelt and the Bull Moose Party in 1912. But it was still just 19%; Perot wasn’t elected, of course. What he did was throw the election to the Democrat, Bill Clinton, who received only 43% of the vote. That was more than Bush’s 38%, so Clinton was elected. Something similar happened in 1996 when Bob Dole was the Republican candidate, although not as dramatically. The effect of third party candidate Ross Perot was to throw the election to Clinton twice.

Today, some people think Ron Paul may run as a third party candidate if he doesn’t get the Republican nomination. If so, the result will be the same- the election will be thrown to the Democrat (Obama).

No, if you want to get elected President, or to Congress other than as some sort of an anomaly, you’re going to have to do it through one of the two national political parties.

That’s what the tea party doesn’t seem to realize. You have to have a national political organization behind you; rallies and protests won’t do it. Rallies and protests can be effective in influencing the vote of some elected officials on certain issues, but those activities won’t get you elected.

The tea party needs to bring its energy, viewpoints, and conviction into the Republican Party to influence the party establishment and move them in the right direction. The tea party needs to work within the party to get good conservative candidates nominated, and then use the party resources and organization to get those candidates elected.

Jamie Radtke, a prominent tea party activist, is running for the Republican U.S. Senate nomination in Virginia. She went on a bus tour throughout Southwest Virginia not too long ago. In setting up this bus tour, she or her campaign did not contact any Republican County Committee Chair or the Republican Ninth District chairman. She just completely ignored them. How does she think she will get the Republican Party behind her by snubbing the party activists? Even if she get’s the nomination, she can’t win in the general election without the part’s full support.

I understand the problem with career politicians and the complacent party establishment that wants mainly wants to go along to get along. But the way to deal with all of that is to build a fire under the establishment and/or overwhelm it, not alienate it.

The tea party also needs to understand that it matters who the nominee is. They need to put forth candidates who are astute politicians and who can appeal to non-tea party voters.

This was the problem with Sharon Angle in Nevada and Delaware Girl Christine O’Donnell. The tea party got them the Republican nominations for U.S. Senate, but then couldn’t get them elected because they were, well, poor candidates. Remember the infamous “I am not a witch” news conference of Delaware Girl?

All in all, if the tea party doesn’t get a little savvier and do a better job of using the resources of the established political parties, I fear it will lose momentum.

Another Un-won War

2012-01-04T14:41:00.000-08:00

The last American troops have left Iraq. In his comments regarding this event, President Obama did not use any of these words: victory, mission accomplished, win, won, triumph, success, complete, or any other such words. Quite the contrary: A few months ago, Obama said he was uncomfortable with the notion of “victory” in Iraq. So our soldiers just left one day, and we now have another un-won war.

This is a real problem. There are consequences to un-won wars, just as there are consequences when we win.

Let’s look at real examples from United States history that show the consequences of wars that were won and those that were not.

The last war that America won decisively was World War II (WWII). Both Germany and Japan surrendered unconditionally.

For Japan, this happened only after the Japanese Navy was completely destroyed and the American’s were totally defeating the Japanese on Pacific island after island in ferocious, all-out, scorched earth, bloody fighting on their way to an assault on the Japanese mainland (which it was estimated would have resulted in hundreds of thousand of casualties on both side). The nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki eliminated the need for that mainland invasion, but only after the Japanese emperor stepped in and overruled the Japanese military, which wanted to fight on.

In Europe, it was a ground and air war. We all know about D-Day, the longest day, which Eisenhower agonizingly delayed for three days due to weather, and then gave the go-ahead even though the weather was still marginal at best because he couldn’t keep all of those masses of ships and troops waiting offshore any longer. It was the largest amphibious assault in history. After the success of D-Day, it was on to Berlin. On the way, there was the Battle of the Bulge, the last major land battle in Europe, which came close to being a disaster for the Allies, but we held on. The German Air Force (the much vaunted Luftwaffe) had been eliminated, and we were relentlessly pounding military and industrial sites from the air with impunity. The Red Army was closing in from the East. Finally, Hitler realized it was over and committed suicide (with his mistress, Eva Braun). After the war, Germany was a pile of rubble.

It was total victory for the U.S. and it’s allies, and total defeat for Germany and Japan. What have been the long-term consequences of this war that we won decisively? Today, Germany is Europe’s strongest economy, Japan is a major world economy, they have high standards of living, their people are well off, they are modern not third world countries, and both are our good friends. On a personal note, I worked for a company that did forty percent of its business in Japan, and I traveled there many times.

Let’s look at another example of the consequences of a war that was decisively won, the Civil War. I am a Civil War history buff; I must have read two dozen books about the Civil War, the events that lead up to it, and its aftermath. The devastation of this war is incomprehensible to people today. Generals routinely lost a quarter or a third of their army, and lived to fight another day. Lincoln knew that he couldn’t just win battles, but that he had to destroy the rebel army in totality. Lee knew that his only chance for victory was to score some big win on northern territory early on that would be psychologically devastating, hence Antietam and Gettysburg. Toward the end, General Sheridan saw the Shenandoah Valley as the breadbasket of the Confederacy by which the Confederate Army was fed. He laid waste to it, saying that he wanted a crow flying from end to end to find not one kernel of grain, and he pretty much succeeded. The only reason Lee and Jackson didn’t do similar things was because they never got the chance.

In the end, the number of casualties was appalling: over six hundred thousand killed and over one million killed, wounded, or missing in action, at a time when the total population of the country was thirty-one million. It took a hundred years for the economy in the southern states to fully recover.

The Union won decisively, and what have the long-term consequences been? The United States of America that we see today.

Now what about the consequences of wars that we got into but didn’t win?

We’ll start with Korea. We did not win that war, by any account. It was a negotiated truce. North Korea was left intact, and it has been a nightmare for the North Koreans and the world ever since. The North Korean people live under an extremely oppressive regime and are virtually starving to death while the country’s ruling dictator and his select few live in immense luxury. Consider one little factoid: The recently deceased Kim the elder apparently liked good brandy, and reportedly spent $850,00 on it in one year, while his people starved. And then there is that matter of the nuclear weapons that North Korea may have. What will happen if this unstable, rogue country ever gets them for sure and the means to deliver them? This is all the result of a war that America got into but didn’t win.

How about Vietnam? Fifty-seven thousand Americans died in that war plus many thousands more that were wounded or missing in action. We didn’t win that one either; as with Iraq, we just left one day. The consequences: The North Vietnam communist regime took aver South Vietnam, the very thing we were fighting to prevent. Our soldiers died in vain.

Consider Iran. In 1979, Iran disregarded all international norms and occupied the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking a number of the embassy’s staff, U.S. citizens, prisoner. This was an act of war, because centuries-old international law grants diplomats immunity from arrest and regards an embassy to be that country’s sovereign territory. Respect for those principles is considered by all countries to be the most basic tenet of international relations. If an embassy is taken over or otherwise violated, it is equivalent to a similar act on that country’s homeland. Fifty-two Americans were held hostage by Iran after the embassy take-over for 444 days (a few others were released earlier). In the face of this clear act of war, President Carter dithered. After several months, he authorized a military rescue mission that failed miserably. The hostages were held for several more months before finally being released after Reagan was elected President.

The consequence of our failure to recognize Iran’s actions for what they were, an act of war, and to deal with Iran accordingly is that we are still to this day being threatened by Iran’s dangerous behavior. We know the Iranians were supporting terrorists in Iraq, leading to the deaths of American soldiers. Iran has said it wants to wipe one of our strategic allies, Israel, off the map. Iran is trying to go nuclear. Recently, Iran threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which passes a large portion of the worlds oil.

And how about those soldiers that left Iraq recently? The only reason they were there in the first place is because we didn’t win the first Gulf War with Iraq in 1991. In that one, we pushed Iraqi forces out of Kuwait (which they had invaded), declared victory, and left the Saddam Hussein regime in power in Iraq. The rest is history.

There is an unmistakable lesson to be learned from these wars that were won or not. Since the United States is a major world power, there are significant consequences to the outcome of any armed conflict that we undertake. Winning brings good things; losing or just giving up brings more problems that only get worse as the years go by.

Christmas 1776

2011-12-23T10:01:00.000-08:00

As we are enjoying our Christmas festivities this year, let us remember another Christmas day over two hundred years ago that may well have altered the course of American history.

1776 had been a very discouraging year militarily for the Americans. The Continental Army had suffered several defeats in New York and had retreated to Pennsylvania. Morale was low; soldiers were deserting. Soldiers lacked adequate clothes and sometimes even shoes. Public spirits were very low.

General Washington knew that he needed some sort of a success soon in order to keep the whole revolutionary effort from collapsing. He devised a plan to attack the enemy garrison at Trenton, New Jersey, which consisted of about 2000 Hessian soldiers. There is speculation that this particular target and time were selected because Hessians are German; they were mercenaries (hired soldiers). Christmas is a big deal in Germany, and it was felt that the Hessians would no doubt have a lavish dinner on the evening of Christmas Day with much beer and dancing. Early the next morning would be a good time to challenge them.

On Christmas Eve, Washington called together his Lieutenants and outlined the plan. The army was to attack across the Delaware River in three places. One force, a smaller one, would cross downriver of Trenton and advance north. A second, even smaller force would attack directly across the river at Trenton and hold a strategic bridge over a creek that could be used by the enemy as a retreat route.

Washington would lead the largest force, 2400 men, which would cross the river nine miles upstream and then head south to Trenton.

Everything depended upon the crossing of the river by these three forces. This was to occur on Christmas night and be finished by midnight. They would arrive at Trenton at five o’clock the next morning and the attack would occur at 6:00 a.m., an hour before daybreak.

On Christmas Day, the weather started deteriorating. The river was high and contained much ice. As the day progressed, the weather got worse. It turned into a full-fledged storm. It rained, hailed, snowed, and froze.

The river crossing was extremely treacherous, at night in a storm. Horses and artillery as well as soldiers had to be loaded onto the boats and taken across. The two smaller forces, unbeknownst to Washington, could not cross at all due to the ice. Washington’s force got across by 3:00 a.m., three hours late. A Sergeant informed General Washington that the soldiers’ powder was wet and they could not fire their muskets. Washington replied that they were to use their bayonets.

The attack began just after eight o’clock in the morning on Dec.26. It all happened very fast, in snow. After forty-five minutes, it was over. Twenty-one Hessians were killed (including their commander), ninety wounded, and nine hundred taken prisoner. About five hundred escaped over the very bridge that was supposed to have been blocked by one of the smaller Continental Army forces but wasn’t because that force couldn’t get across the river. Incredibly enough, no Americans were killed in the battle and only four were wounded, although two froze to death the night before in the march.

Although the strategic fruits of the battle were minimal, the psychological effects were phenomenal.The Americans had beaten a force of the British regulars. Prisoners had been taken; the Americans had captured canons and other materiel. The course of the war had been changed.

A Commission Designed To Fail

2011-12-18T13:12:00.000-08:00

The budget deficit and debt debate has been so debilitating to Congress that they gave up on trying to reach an agreement and instead appointed the so-called “super committee” to do it. This committee, consisting of six Democrats and six Republicans, was chartered to formulate a plan for reducing the deficit by $1.2 trillion over the next ten years. The committee would report back to Congress with its plan, and Congress would vote on it. If no plan was presented or if Congress voted it down, automatic spending cuts equal to the $1.2 trillion would kick in.

In government, when you want to make sure nothing happens, you appoint a committee.

There are 535 members of Congress (100 U.S. Senators and 435 Representatives). They argued about the debt and deficit for months, and couldn’t agree. What reason was there to think that this super-committee of twelve would be able to work magic and come up with a plan when Congress had been so utterly unable to do so for so long? And even if the committee did somehow develop a debt plan, what reason was there to think Congress would approve it after Congress had been deadlocked for so long?

The answer is that this committee was designed to fail. The people appointed to it were the most ideological from both sides. There was no chance they were going to come together after all of the political wrangling and suddenly have a love fest. It was just a way of letting Congress kick the can down the road a little longer and avoid having to make tough choices.

So the committee has failed, as planned, and the automatic spending cuts will be enacted.

In a paragon of political double-speak, Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) said, “It wasn’t so much a failure as a failure to seize an opportunity.” If you want to know what’s wrong in Washington, just mull that statement over for awhile. Here we have a committee that was given the expressed mandate to formulate a plan to reduce the budget deficit by $1.2 trillion, yet when the committee functionally collapses with no plan, it’s not a failure, it’s a missed opportunity.

Mr. Hensarling, instead of lamenting this missed opportunity, why don’t you take the lead in getting Congress to fix the problem? Congress has unlimited opportunities to fix the deficit. Congress could have done it instead of appointing a committee. Congress could go into session tomorrow, or the next day, or next week, or next month, and do what needs to be done.

Well, now because this committee has failed, oops, I mean missed an opportunity, we’ll be afflicted with those “draconian” (if I hear that word one more time, I’m going to throw up) automatic across-the-board budget cuts.

No.

Congress, demonstrating yet again that it isn’t serious about any of this, put in place the provision that the cuts won’t happen until 2013, over a year from now.

Once again, we see that the committee was a farce. It didn’t have those “draconian” (excuse me for a moment – OK, I‘m back now) cuts hanging over it ready to immediately fall like a guillotine if the committee failed to reach agreement. The cuts won’t happen until over a year from now!

Hmmm - 2013. There’s something about that date. 2013, 2013 – what is it? Oh, yes, we have an election in November 2012. They put the cuts off until after the next election!

So what do you think will happen in the first Session of Congress in 2013? They’ll undo the cuts, of course. The cuts will never happen, and that was the way it was planned.

You can’t make this stuff up.

$1.2 trillion sounds like a lot of money, but in the world of Washington, it isn’t.

The total federal deficit recently reached $15 trillion. So even if the deficit were reduced by $1.2 trillion, it would be a rather modest 8% reduction. And that’s over ten years, so it comes out to only 0.8% per year. Yes, all of this caterwauling in D.C. is because they can’t find a way to reduce the budget deficit by somewhat less than 1% a year.

Or look at it this way. The total federal budget for 2011 is $3.8 trillion. The $1.2 trillion of cuts over ten years represents a cut of $0.12 trillion per year, or a little more than 3% per year.

In a time of financial distress, Congress can’t manage to reduce the federal budget by 3% a year or reduce the deficit by 0.8% a year. How much do we pay these people?

It gets better. Another factoid that no one is talking about right now is that even if the $1.2 trillion of cuts do happen, nothing is actually going to be cut. That’s right, even under that “draconian” (there I go again) scenario, nothing will be cut, because in Washington, an increase is a cut. The “cuts” that are the target of all of these political machinations represent a reduction in the budget increase. That’s the notorious base-line budgeting process whereby every year the federal budget automatically increases across the board by some percentage, and then any reductions to those increases are demagogued as “draconian” (I can’t help it) cuts. But the spending goes up in absolute terms everywhere. So an increase is a cut in Washington; even if those $1.2 trillion in “cuts” happen, spending will still go up. Nothing will be cut!

Here’s what’s really going on. There is a fundamental ideological war going on in this country. There are two competing visions for the future of America. Liberals want to continue on the path to a European-style socialist democracy with lots more government spending, much higher taxes and more government borrowing, a much smaller military, complete government-run healthcare, more government spending on “green” energy, more entitlements (the latest proposal being government-paid-for baby diapers), more government jobs programs, more environmental regulations, and so on. Conservatives what to roll back the welfare state, cut government spending, reduce taxes, reduce regulations that inhibit the economy, keep a strong national defense, promote traditional American values and patriotism, foster individual responsibility and self-reliance, let the private economy create jobs, and not have the government do anything for people that the people could and should do for themselves.

This battle for the future of the country vis-à-vis big government vs. small government has been going on for decades, but it has intensified during the last three years. Since then, Democrats and Republicans in Congress have been fighting vigorously over everything, but especially over the issues of government spending, entitlements, the federal budget, and the deficit, as we have all witnessed.

The resolution to this fundamental conflict will not come until November 2012. Until then, expect more of the same.

Obama's Occupiers

2011-12-11T09:36:00.000-08:00

On October 18, speaking of the Occupiers, President Obama said on ABC news, “We are on their side.” And the President told Occupy demonstrators in New Hampshire, “You are the reason I ran for office.”

Here are some recent news headlines and quotes concerning the Occupiers:
“Wall Street Protesters Evicted From Camp”
“Police roust protesters from New York square”
“It took 150 Sanitation Department workers hours to clear the mess, finding everything from hypodermic needles to buckets of human waste”
“L.A. Police Disperse Protesters’ Camp”
“Death brings more pressure to close camps”
“Occupy Atlanta organizers said Sunday that they plan to again try to camp at a city park, setting up yet another overnight showdown with police a night after 19 people were arrested -----.”
“Anti-Wall Street protesters dig in against police”
“Occupy Wall Street Gets More Violent”
“Kitchen Volunteer’s Sex Arrest Shocks Zucotti Park”
“Police clear protesters near Oakland’s City Hall” “They cited concerns about rats, fire hazards, public urination, and acts of violence at the site.”
“A woman involved in the Occupy Philadelphia protests was raped in a tent by another protester”
”Salt lake City police Chief Chris Burbank said officers have made 91 arrests at the camp -----.”
“These incidents follow violence last month in Oakland, California, in which protestors shut down a busy port, took over abandoned buildings, set fires, burned American flags, defaced private property, and destroyed ATM’s.”

These are apparently Obama’s kind of people.

Who, besides Obama, sympathizes with the Occupiers? The Socialist Party USA, the Democrat Socialists of America, the Communist Party, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, House Democrat Minority Leader Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, and one of the main committees of the Democrat Party (the Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee) have all either endorsed the Occupiers outright or expressed support for them.

I have some questions for you. How many tea party rallies did the police clear out? How many tea partiers were arrested? How many people were raped, shot, or assaulted at a tea party really? How many tea partiers shouted insults at police, or at anybody? How many American flags were burned at a tea party rally? How many buckets of human waste did the tea partiers leave behind? Did you ever hear tea partiers saying such things as “take back”, “reinforcements”, “tactics”, “demands”, and other such aggressive talk as has come from the Occupiers? No, tea partiers would have a remarkably well behaved rally and then go home (leaving the area cleaner than when they arrived). They might also call or write a letter to their Congressman.

What do the Occupiers want, other than sex, drugs, and a rent-free place to live? It’s hard to tell, since when some of them were asked, they gave incoherent answers. When they have been able to speak clearly about their issues, they have said that they want an end to all home foreclosures and millions of new living-wage jobs.

Lets look at the demand for an end to all foreclosures, and do a little thought experiment. Suppose that actually happened. What would immediately occur next, as a result? Everybody would stop paying their mortgage, of course, which would lead to a new economic catastrophe that would make the one we just came through look puny by comparison. So, ending all home foreclosures is a nonsensical idea.

What about the Occupiers’ demand for millions of new, living-wage jobs? This is a laudable goal, but where could those millions of new jobs possibly come from? In order for these new jobs to be sustainable, on-going jobs rather than just temporary make-work jobs, they could only come from a re-invigorated private sector, the very thing that the Occupiers decry! More silliness.

These Occupiers fall into the category of “useful idiots”. They are useful to the Democrats now because they direct the public’s attention away from Obama’s terrible record as President. And since the Occupiers have become experienced in street violence and anarchy, they could also be very useful to Obama and the Democrats after the next Presidential election in the event Obama looses.

Democrats Are Killing Jobs

2011-11-16T14:51:00.000-08:00

When President Obama proposed “son of stimulus”, any remaining doubt about his intentions was removed. He doesn’t care about jobs; his overriding concern is to massively increase government spending and raise taxes to pay for it. One member of Obama’s staff famously said a crisis should never go to waste. That’s what this is all about - Obama using the economic situation as an opportunity to further his agenda. He doesn’t want to solve the problem; he wants to exploit it. He and his enablers are statists who want most of all to increase government control of every aspect of our lives. To them, only the elite ruling class is competent enough to know what’s good for the masses.

If Obama wants jobs, why does he prevent more off-shore drilling and the thousands of high paying jobs that would go with it? Why does he want to bankrupt the coal industry (as he was caught on tape saying)? Why has he delayed the Keystone pipeline project that would create more thousands of jobs? Why is he letting the EPA put forth even stricter standards that will cause AEP to have to close six power plants (including Glen Lyn). Why is he pushing cap-and-trade that will send thousands of jobs overseas? Why is his administration going after Gibson Guitar? Why did he let his NLRB sue Boeing to keep them from building a new factory in South Carolina? Why is he continually talking about higher taxes? Why is Obama doing so much to kill jobs if he wants jobs?

The facts show that the first stimulus was an abject failure. Unemployment is stuck at 9%, and the real unemployment rate that covers the underemployed and those who have given up is estimated to be at 16%. The economy is still on life support and the housing market is not recovering at all. These are the results that Obama and crew have achieved with all of their massive government spending.

What is their response to the failure of the first stimulus and all the other government spending? Spend more!

The government has no money of its own. It only has money that it takes from us as taxes, or it can borrow.

How can the government stimulate the economy by taking money from one citizen (as taxes) and giving it to another citizen? There is no net gain in that.

Or even worse, as is now happening, how can the government stimulate the economy by spending borrowed money. The national debt is now close to $14 trillion, which will all have to be paid back with interest. This will be a burden to the federal budget and the economy for generations. You can’t continually borrow your way to prosperity.

The Republicans tried to provide some adult supervision in the recent debt ceiling issue, but the Democrats fought it tooth and toenail. The Democrats don’t care about trillions of debt and all of the bad effects of that; they demand more of it.

If you want to look back at the Great Depression, it is actually very instructive. President Roosevelt and all of his massive government spending and government make-work jobs did not solve the unemployment problem. What got us out of the Great Depression was World War II and the real jobs in the private sector that came from that.

If Obama wants to create jobs, he needs to learn how to do it.

Steve Jobs literally started Apple Computer in his garage, with his high school buddy. After some initial success with his fledgling company, Steve Jobs was fired from the company he founded by the person he himself had recruited to take over as President so that Steve could focus on the technical innovation side of things. He then founded another company, sold it to Apple, returned to Apple again as part of the deal, and the rest is history, as they say. Today, Apple Computer is wildly successful, has revolutionized the way we get and use information, employs 46,000 people, has created thousand of other jobs in suppliers, has made millionaires of hundreds of its employees through stock option grants, and has more cash on hand than the U.S. government!

This all happened without one penny of government stimulus money. There are untold more such examples. That is how you create jobs - provide an environment where companies large and small can flourish, grow, and hire people because they need them. Obama does the exact opposite; he punishes companies and incites class warfare.

Liberals Feel; Conservatives Think

2011-11-12T13:45:00.000-08:00

During my decades of observing and commenting on political and social issues, I have slowly come to the conclusion that liberals apparently live in a parallel universe where reality is not defined by past history, logic, reason, hard data, common sense, and factual observations but rather by how one feels. Reality to a liberal is determined by their feelings and their dogma. This is why you can’t have a legitimate debate of the issues with liberals; what they feel must be true even though past history and hard data show the contrary.

Let’s go on a journey through the parallel universe in which liberals live.

Liberals’ parallel universe: The “rich” don’t pay their fair share of taxes.
Real universe of facts: The top 1% of income earners paid 38% of all federal incomes taxes, the top 5% paid 59%, and the top 10% paid 70%, according to IRS data from 2008, the most recent year for which data is available. On the other end of the income scale, 49% of U.S. households paid no federal income tax whatsoever.
Liberal response: The rich have too much money and need to pay more, no matter what IRS statistics one can come up with.

Liberals’ parallel universe: The current federal budget deficit could be fixed if the “rich” paid only a little more in taxes.
Real universe of hard data: If Congress tried to pay off the deficit by raising taxes on small businesses, investors, and individuals making more than $250,000 per year, the top two tax rates would have to be raised to 132% and 142%, i.e., more than the affected people make. If Washington took all of the income of the top 1% , it would yield $938 billion, compared to a $14 trillion national debt.
Liberal response: Well, no matter, the rich need to pay more.

Liberal’s parallel universe: The economy can be jump-started by government spending.
Real universe of historical experience: After TARP, the stimulus, bailouts of Wall Street, bailouts of Detroit, cash-for-clunkers, bailouts of the states, bailouts of teachers, huge government deficit spending, etc. the economy has not recovered, the housing market is still in the tank, and unemployment has not gone down.
Liberal response: The government didn’t spend enough; we need another stimulus.

Liberals’ parallel universe: The temperature of the earth’s atmosphere is rising due to the effects of mankind’s energy usage.
Real universe of actual events: Leaked emails from East Anglia University, one of the major climate research institutions, show that climate research scientists who support man-made global warming fudged the numbers to get the answer they wanted, ignored evidence to the contrary, ostracized and persecuted scientists who disagreed with them, and raked in millions of dollars in research grants in the process.
Real world of common sense: Meteorologists can’t accurately and consistently predict the weather for next week, the Farmer’s Almanac can’t reliably tell us what the weather will be this coming year, but global warming scientists can predict the earth’s temperature fifty years from now to within a hundredth of a degree, with surety.
Liberal response: It doesn’t matter, because man-made global warming just must be true.

Liberals’ parallel universe: Public schools are failing, in general, because they are underfunded.
Real universe of observable, factual results: The Washington, D.C. schools get more money per capita than any school system in the country, but achieve some of the worst results. Catholic schools spend much less than public schools per student and get some of the highest results.
Liberal response: It’s all about the children! Schools need more money!

Liberals’ parallel universe: Unemployment benefits are good for the economy.
Real world of common sense: So why don’t we just all quit our jobs (or get fired) and go on unemployment? The economy would boom.
Liberal response: Umm, umm, well ------.

Liberals’ parallel universe: We live in a racist society. People of color are held back.
Real universe of actual people: Condoleeza Rich, Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas, Barack Obama, Alan West, Marco Rubio, Michael Steele, Herman Cain, E. W. Jackson, the NFL, the NBA, Francis Rice, Thomas Sowell, college faculties, Nikki Haley, Jesse Lee Peterson, etc.
Liberal response: They don’t count.

Liberals’ parallel universe: People should wash their jeans less and do all sorts of other things in order to save water, because if we don’t, the planet will run out.
Real universe of science: The water cycle: Water evaporates from the oceans, goes into the atmosphere as water vapor, condenses and falls back down to Earth as rain or snow or ice, and the cycle repeats itself over and over. The water does not leave the planet. Local shortages can occur, but the planet will not run out of water, barring some cosmic event.
Liberal response: Huh?

Liberals’ parallel universe: Bill Clinton is a respectable person.
Real world of actual people and events: Jennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, and Juanita Broderick all accused Bill Clinton of sexual abuse of the worst sort. Ms. Broderick actually accused Clinton of raping her. Clinton settled with Ms. Jones for $850,000. And then there was Monica.
Liberal response: Well, Clinton supports abortion and other liberal causes, so he must be a good guy. We need more people like him.

Liberals’ parallel universe: Cigarette smoke is so dangerous that smokers must be banished to 25 feet from an office building because just a whiff of second-hand smoke or even coming into contact with third-hand smoke (yes, we’re up to third hand smoke now), such as touching the steering wheel of a car in which someone has smoked a lot, can kill you.
Real world of common sense: Touching the steering wheel of a smoker’s car can kill you?
Liberal response: You want people to die, don’t you?

The list goes on: Barack Obama has been a good President; The “occupy” movement is a peaceful uprising of ordinary citizens; Ted Kennedy was a great human being; “Cash for clunkers” was a worthwhile program; The H1N1 scare warranted a massive government response; Eating red meat is bad for you; CO2 is a pollutant; Passing out condoms to ninth graders is a good idea; Polar bears are dying off; The sub-prime mortgage collapse was caused by greedy banks; etc. ad nauseum. All of these notions are demonstrably false in the real world of rational fact-based thought, but they and many others live on and thrive in the parallel liberal universe of “feelings”.

The next time you try to have a discussion of some issue with a liberal, notice how quickly they resort to name calling and the questioning of your character. That’s because if they debate the issue, whatever it is, using facts, hard data, actual experience, logic, and reason, they lose every time. So they call you names instead and retreat to the safety of their parallel universe where all that matters is how they feel.

Yes we Cain!

2011-10-29T11:49:00.000-07:00

Herman Cain is running for the Republican nomination to be their candidate for President in the 2012 election. To say that he’s not your usual Presidential candidate is an understatement. As far as I’m concerned, he’s a breath of fresh air in what can be the stultifying world of political candidates.

Let’s take a quick look at his life. He has truly lived the American dream.

Herman Cain grew up in Atlanta in the 1950’s and 60’s with, as his bio says, “loving parents and little else”. His father worked three jobs and his mother was a domestic worker. Their dream was for their two children to go to college. Herman graduated from Morehouse College in 1967 with a degree in mathematics, and his brother graduated from Morris Brown College. Mission accomplished.

Herman went on to get a Master’s degree in computer science from Purdue University while working full-time for the Department of the Navy (as a civilian employee). After moving back to Atlanta, he took a job as a computer systems analyst for Coca-Cola. His mathematics and computer science degrees made Herman somewhat of a techno-geek of that time. He liked the work, but gravitated toward business management. He moved to Pillsbury and became regional vice-president of the Burger King division. Herman was assigned to a low performing region of 450 restaurants, and within three years it became the best performing segment of the company.

With that success under his belt (no pun intended), Herman accepted the challenge to become President of Godfather’s Pizza, a company that was close to bankruptcy. Herman and his management team returned Godfather’s to profitability; then they bought the company!

All of this led to Herman being named President of the National Restaurant Association, a trade and lobbying group for the restaurant industry. In this role, he once had the opportunity to speak to President Clinton regarding the impact to businesses of Clinton’s proposed health care overhaul. Herman challenged the President on this issue, which gained Herman some national attention. Newsweek magazine credited him with being one of the primary reasons that Hillarycare got nowhere.

Herman’s work at the National Restaurant Association gave him the opportunity to work with business leaders across the country. This resulted in him being named to the Board of Directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. He subsequently became Chairman of the Board.

Think about this life. Here is a person who started with literally nothing except his God-given talents, a desire to get ahead, and a willingness to work hard to make it happen. And look at what he’s accomplished! Only in America; that’s what I love about this country.

Now Herman is running for President, because he thinks the country is headed in the wrong direction. He sees a big, bloated federal government that is exerting too much control over almost everything; he sees an economy that is on life-support with no improvement in sight; he sees federal government policies that are making the economic problem worse; he sees out-of-control federal spending; he sees a President who only wants more of the same. Herman wants to get us back on track as a nation so that the American dream he experienced can continue to be available to future generations and so we will remain the land of the free.

I had the opportunity to hear Herman speak live at an event last June. At that time, he was getting little attention, and many of the political elite were saying that this pizza guy had no chance to get the nomination. Herman came out on stage and blew the others away. No one else was close. His catch line was: I didn’t get that memo (saying I have no chance), so I’m going on. Nicely done, I thought.

Speaking of the “pizza guy”, I really do wish Herman would let it be known that he was Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank in Kansas City. Given that the economy is one of our major problems and there is all of this talk about monetary policy, quantitative easing, inflation/deflation, interest rates, etc., I don’t understand why Herman doesn’t play up his experience in this area more. No other candidate has this kind of monetary policy experience

Now Herman is pushing his “9-9-9” plan to improve the economy and overhaul the federal tax code. His plan is getting a lot of attention. It’s all over the news, the internet, and even The Wall Street Journal did a piece on it. In one of the recent debates, the other candidates were attacking 9-9-9 from all angles, which was curious, I thought, since at the time the only other candidate with an economic plan was Romney. So all of the others who had no plan were attacking Cain’s plan!

Herman’s 9-9-9 plan does, however, need to be discussed and debated. That’s as it should be. But whatever you may think of 9-9-9, Herman deserves credit for taking a bold position and for initiating a national discussion on this major issue, rather than tiptoeing through the tulips, as politicians are wont to do.

And that brings me to another reason why I like what I see in Cain: He’s not a career politician. Herman isn’t running for President because he’s next in line, or because this is his next promotion, or because he’s good at telling people what they want to hear, or because he has been pandering to various special interest groups his whole life and they will now support him, or for his own self-aggrandizement.

Not being a career politician has another benefit: Herman has no fear of the party bosses. They didn’t make him, and they can’t hurt him. His career isn’t at stake. He’s already made it in life. He is untouchable.

Herman has lived his life in the real world; a world where he solved problems instead of just talking about them. It’s a world where posturing isn’t enough; you actually have to deliver. He wants to be elected President so he can lead the way in solving our nation’s problems and ensuring that America remains that shining city on a hill, the world’s last best hope, the greatest nation on Earth.

Government Greed

2011-10-15T15:52:00.000-07:00

Greed – Intense and selfish desire for something, especially wealth, power, or food. (Oxford American Dictionary).

President Obama and others in Washington have been vilifying “the rich” for months, saying among other things that they don’t pay their “fair share” in taxes. The greedy “rich” apparently want to keep all of that money for themselves, the selfish SOB’s.

And now we are hearing about “corporate greed” and all of the selfish people on “Wall Street”. Why do they hoard all of that money; why don’t they hire some people or do some such generous and appropriate activity with that money; spread it around, you know? But no, they keep it all for themselves. How greedy; they need to be punished.

I have a different view. There is a much bigger, much more powerful, much greedier villain out there: the federal government. I am organizing a new “occupy” movement. I want “we the people” to rise up and march on Washington to send a message to that huge, bloated, selfish bureaucracy and its protectorate (i.e., politicians).

Let me tell you a story about one of the “greedy” corporations I worked for. It was, at the time, a mid-sized, growing company with great prospects. Their goal was to dominate their market by way of superior products, which would lead them to becoming a big company. But, along the way, there was a business slowdown. In order to remain at a sustainable profit level and keep going toward the future growth that would no doubt return, the company President decided that two actions would be taken: 1) There would be a six percent reduction in the workforce, and 2) All executives, of which I was one, would take a ten percent pay cut. And so it was done. It wasn’t pleasant, but that’s what well-run companies do when their income goes down and it no longer lines up with expenses. In this case, the growth did return. Today that company is the dominant player in its market, is very profitable, and provides high-paying jobs for tens of thousands of people.

This is just one of an untold number of such stories in the corporate world.

How about Apple Computer, whose founder, Steve Jobs, tragically died of cancer at a young age recently? Steve Jobs literally started Apple Computer in his garage, with his high school buddy. After some initial success with his fledgling company, Steve Jobs was fired from the company he founded by the person he himself had recruited to take over as President so that Steve could focus on the technical innovation side of things. He then founded another company, sold it to Apple, returned to Apple again as part of the deal, and the rest is history, as they say. Today, Apple Computer is wildly successful, has revolutionized the way we get and use information, employs 46,000 people, has created thousand of other jobs in suppliers, has made millionaires of hundreds of its employees through stock option grants, and has more cash on hand than the U.S. government!

Is Apple Computer greedy? If so, give me more of it. All of those job holders plus the roughly seventy percent of Americans who are either directly or indirectly dependent upon corporations for some of their financial well being through the stock market, mutual finds, or retirement plans would probably agree.

Was Steve Jobs greedy? When he died, he was worth billions, and was also the largest shareholder in Disney Corporation (through another brilliant deal of his). Does he really need that much money?

I celebrate what Steve Jobs did. It’s the quintessential American story. Look at how many other people his “greed”, if you want to call it that, has enriched.

I don’t want to soak the rich such as Steve Jobs and others of his ilk; I want to join them!

Contrast these stories with the government’s intense desire for money and power.

During the last three years or so, our economy has gone through some very tough times, and it still is sickly. Obama has said that we were at the “precipice” economically. Given all of that, has the government cut back any? Has Congress taken a pay cut? Have any of Obama’s multitudinous czars taken a pay cut? Has the federal bureaucracy been cut? Has anybody in the federal government lost his job due to a reduction in force? Has federal spending been cut such that the budget is balanced, as corporations do routinely when times are tough?

None of that has happened. Quite the contrary. Obama is telling Congress it needs to spend MORE, and he is calling for higher taxes. Think about that. In the midst of all of this economic carnage, his response is to go on yet another spending spree and to demand that the federal government be given more of our money.

No, I don’t worry about corporate greed, because corporations have very limited power over me. In most instances, I can simply walk away from them if I think they are misbehaving. Corporations can’t pass a law requiring me to do something.

But the government, now they have real power over my life.

I worry about a government that is continually demanding more money from whomever seems to be the most promising target at the time. I worry about a government so power crazed that it wants to get total control of the very air that I breathe. I worry about a government that is so hell bent on exercising absolute control over my life that it is trying to seize the medical system and associated decisions that determine whether I live or die. I worry about a government that is completely incapable of showing even a modicum of financial responsibility. I worry about a government that is starting to tell me what I can and cannot eat. I worry about a government that pits one group of Americans against another in class warfare rhetoric to foment hate, under the strategy that if the people are fighting amongst themselves, the government can do pretty much what it wants. I worry about a government that uses its “bully pulpit” and the force of law in these ways.

If that’s not “greed”, then the word has no meaning. Government greed is the most dangerous kind, because it’s extremely difficult to rein it in. That’s the greed we should all be worried about it.

Is Social Security A Ponzi Scheme?

2011-09-29T18:15:00.000-07:00

Few people attract so much notoriety that their name is coined into a new word. One interesting example is the word “hooker”, meaning a prostitute, which came to us from General Joseph Hooker during the Civil War who reportedly had so many women of ill-repute hanging around his headquarters that they became known as “hookers”.

Another example is “Ponzi scheme”.

Recently, a Presidential candidate said that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. What was he talking about?

According to the Securities and Exchange Commission, a “Ponzi scheme” is an investment fraud that involves the payment of “returns” to existing investors from funds contributed by new investors. Ponzi scheme organizers often solicit new investors by promising to invest their money in opportunities that are claimed to generate very high rates of return with little or no risk. In many Ponzi schemes, the perpetrators focus on attracting new money to make promised payments to earlier-stage investors and to siphon off for personal use, instead of engaging in any legitimate investment activity.

With little or no real earnings, the schemes require a consistent flow of new money from investors in order to remain in operation. Ponzi schemes collapse when it becomes difficult to recruit enough new investors or when a large number of existing investors ask to cash out.

The schemes are named after Charles Ponzi, who conned thousands of New England residents into investing in a postage stamp speculation scheme in 1916. At a time when the annual bank account interest rate was 5%, Ponzi promised investors that he could provide a 50% return in only 90 days. Ponzi initially bought international mail coupons in support of his scheme with the intent of reselling them in another country at a higher price, but he quickly switched to using new investors’ money to pay the promised high returns to earlier investors. Once Ponzi was no longer able to persuade enough investors to keep giving him additional money, his scheme collapsed. Ponzi didn’t invent this type of fraud, but he took in so much money that his was the first to become widely known in the U.S.

Under the Social Security (SS) system, employees and employers pay into the system, and employees receive a monthly pension upon retirement.

The payments to current SS recipients are taken from current incoming SS money. Any money that is not paid out is put into certain special U.S. Government bonds. That is, the SS system loans any left-over money to the rest of the government, which immediately spends it, as part of general revenues, on defense, the federal bureaucracy, other entitlements (Medicare, Medicaid), interest, and miscellaneous spending. None of the SS money taken in every year is saved, invested, put aside, or any such thing. The money is either paid out to SS recipients or used for other government spending.

There is no SS “lockbox”. There also is no SS “trust fund” in the sense of a bank account somewhere with money in it that can be drawn on as needed. The SS trust fund, or lockbox, consists solely of promises by the rest of the government to pay the SS system back someday. But since the entire federal government is operating at a deficit and there is a national debt, there is no reserve money with which the SS trust fund can be paid back. The only assurance that the SS system can ever get this money back is the full faith and credit of the U.S. government.

The very first SS recipient, one Ida Mae Fuller of Vermont, received her first check of $22.54 on January 1, 1940. She had paid only $44 in SS taxes over a three year period, but collected a total of $20,993 in benefits, since she lived to be 100. Such high returns were possible in the early years of SS since there were many people paying into the system and only a few taking benefits out. In 1950, there were 15 workers supporting every SS retiree. Today, there are just over three. By 2030, it’ll be down to two. The “baby boomers” are starting to retire and it’s swamping the system.

Another issue affecting SS negatively is that people are living longer and therefore collecting benefits longer. Data from the National Center for Health Statistics show that in 1900 the life expectancy was 47.3 years; 68.2 years in 1950; and 77.3 in 2002. When SS was first enacted in 1935, people didn’t live nearly as long as now, and so the system wasn’t designed to handle an aging population.

In 2010, annual SS costs (benefits paid out plus administration) exceeded non-interest income. However, from 2010 through 2022, total SS income including interest will be more than enough to cover costs. Beginning in 2023, SS assets (bonds and interest) will start to diminish until they are gone in 2036. At that time, there will be no more bonds to redeem or interest income from them, so SS will have only current tax revenues with which to pay benefits. Unless something is changed, that tax revenue stream will support benefits at a level of 77% of what has been promised, and the benefit level will gradually decline thereafter. In order to keep benefits at 100%, either SS taxes will have to be increased significantly or benefits will have to be reduced significantly, or some combination thereof.

Is Social Security a Ponzi scheme? No, because Congress can simply raise taxes and/or reduce benefits in order to keep the system solvent.

But SS does bear some disconcerting resemblance to a Ponzi scheme. Both pay early participants with money taken in from more recent participants. Both function best when there is a continual supply of many new participants. Both systems are unable to pay all participants the full benefits promised.

The key difference is that a Ponzi scheme is doomed to ultimate implosion since it cannot, by its nature, restructure itself. A Ponzi scheme can only keep on keepin’ on until the day of reckoning finally comes. SS will not collapse; it will be fundamentally modified, some day when Congress gets the will, into a sustainable program given today’s demographics.

Obama Wants More Taxes On The "Rich"

2011-09-21T11:33:00.000-07:00

President Obama is worried about the "fairness" of the federal tax code. He says he wants changes to make sure millionaires are taxed at a higher rate than their secretaries. I guess he doesn't know that they already are.

On average, the wealthiest people in America pay a lot more taxes than the middle class or the poor, according to private and government data. They pay at a higher rate, and as a group, they contribute a much larger share of the overall taxes collected by the federal government.

This year, households making more than $1 million will pay an average of 29.1 % of their income in federal taxes, including income taxes, payroll taxes, and other taxes, according to the Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank. Households making between $50,000 and $75,000 will pay an average of 15 % of their income in taxes. Households making between $20,000 and $30,000 will pay 5.7 %.

The latest IRS figures are from 2009 and are limited to federal income taxes; they show much the same thing. In 2009, taxpayers who made $1 million or more paid on average 24.4 % of their income in federal income taxes. Those making $100,000 to $125,000 paid on average 9.9 % in federal income taxes. Those making $50,000 to $60,000 paid an average of 6.3 %.

The Tax Policy Center estimates that 46% of households, mostly low- and medium-income households, will pay no federal income taxes at all this year, although they will pay other taxes.

If Obama wants to make the federal tax code "fair", he's barking up the wrong tree. As shown above through hard numbers, the "rich" already pay more than their "fair share". Obama needs to go after those 46 % of the people who pay not a dime in federal income tax. Wouldn't "fairness" require that everyone pay at least something?

The King's Speech

2011-09-18T14:11:00.000-07:00

It’s déjà vu all over again.

President Obama recently gave his umpteenth speech about the bleak situation we have with jobs and the economy and what needs to be done to make things better. That’ll solve our economic problems – another speech.

The next day, the stock market dropped three hundred points.

Obama proposed his latest and greatest plan to fix the economy, and it was for more of the same: massive government spending, throwing money at his favored groups, demonizing “the rich”, repairing the infrastructure, touting “green jobs” as the savior of the economy, demanding that Congress pass his proposal immediately, blah, blah, blah.

You may have detected that I am more than a little skeptical, which I am, because we have been down this road before with Obama. I’m sure you all remember the last stimulus, in 2009. It was twice as big as this one; we were told at the time that it would revive the economy and keep unemployment under eight percent. We were also told back then that that stimulus, like this one, had to be passed immediately in order to avoid financial calamity. Now, two years later, unemployment is stuck at over nine percent, the economy has flat lined, the housing market is non-existent, and there is almost no good economic news. Everything that Obama and crew told us the last stimulus would prevent has happened! So why would anybody still listen to these people when it comes to the economy and jobs? They are obviously clueless.

I actually read in the paper after Obama’s speech that an economist at Moody’s Analytics said this latest stimulus plan would reduce the unemployment rate to, you guessed it, eight percent!!

Of late, Obama has developed a new concern for the federal budget deficit, or at least he wants us to think so. In his speech, he said that the new spending called for in his current plan will not increase the deficit because everything in his bill will be “paid for”. He didn’t tell us how it would be paid for, though; he promised to do that later.

You can’t make this stuff up.

No matter which way one looks at Obama’s new plan, you find absurdities. Let’s start on a broad, overall scale and then work our way down to some of the specifics.

OK, from the 30,000 foot level, as they say, let’s look at this plan. It’s another government stimulus, much like the last one, only this one is smaller by half. It’s about half as big as the 2009 stimulus, and that one, by any objective measure, was a total failure. Here’s the absurdity: If a big stimulus has already failed, why will a smaller one now work? The only logical argument one could make is that the last stimulus failed because it wasn’t big enough, so now we need a larger one. But a smaller one --- ? Absurd.

Let’s go on to some of the specifics of the new plan.

It calls for government spending to keep teachers, firemen, and police on the job. But why do we only want to keep these groups employed? With the jobs picture being as bleak as it is, we need to do something to increase job creation across the board; we need to get everyone back to work. We need to create economic conditions such that all companies, large and small, in every industry, in every location, will be able to expand and start hiring. It makes no economic sense whatsoever to restrict job creation efforts to just some segments of the work force.

Now let’s look at the proposed tax breaks in Obama’s plan for companies that hire or increase wages.

I worked in the corporate world for over thirty years as an engineer and manager at various levels up to vice president. During that time, I must have hired literally hundreds of people. Never, not once, did I or anyone I knew or observed ever hire somebody because of a tax break, nor would we have. That’s not why businesses and companies hire.

Hiring is a serious matter to companies. It involves taking on a significant new expense that will be there far into the future. Note: I’m not talking about temporary or seasonal help here. Companies are looking out into the future, not just the short term. They don’t like to have to lay people off, so they only hire when they are convinced that they can afford it in the long term and that the additional sales will be there to pay for it. Hiring is a business decision, not a public service matter.

People are hired because the company has more work than it can handle, or because the company is confident that additional business is coming, or because they see a new business opportunity, or they want to do a better job of servicing customers. Those are the reasons that companies hire, certainly not because of some one time tax break or other such gimmick.

People who think that such short term tweaking of tax provisions here and there will stimulate broad scale hiring and reduce unemployment in the long term have absolutely no knowledge of how the business world operates. In the real world, that kind of an approach is pure nonsense.

Then there is the part of Obama’s new plan about giving a tax break to companies that increase workers’ wages. This is so idiotic it defies belief. How could increasing wages possibly spur hiring? If anything, such an action would have the opposite effect, since the more a company pays existing employees, the less money it has to hire new ones. Furthermore, the tax break is a, again, one-time thing, but the increased wages are permanent, so no business will pay the slightest attention to this provision of Obama’s new plan.

Obama wants to, once again, extend unemployment benefits. Regardless of the merits of this proposal on humanitarian grounds, as far as job creation is concerned, it’s another absurdity. Paying people not to work for an even longer period of time will obviously not get them a job. Our goal in this area shouldn’t be to keep people on the unemployment roles for a long time; or goal should be to get them off of unemployment because they have gone back to work. The unemployed don’t need another government handout; they need a job. Extending unemployment benefits will not get them onto somebody’s payroll; if anything, it might discourage them from looking hard.

I have a suggestion for President Obama: If you want to stimulate the economy and job creation across the board, stop doing those things that stymie that. Mr. Obama, you’re part of the problem, and if you truly care about job creation, here are some things you could stop doing.

First, stop demonizing “the rich”. We continually hear you talking about how the rich don’t pay their fair share, that they are greedy, that they got where they are because they won life’s lottery rather than due to their own hard work, etc. Why would anybody, such as a sole proprietor or a small business, who can afford to hire someone actually do it when they feel they are being targeted by the government? So just stop it, Mr. Obama.

Next Mr. Obama, stop punishing companies that you regard as unworthy or that your political cronies don’t like.
Your National Labor Relations Board recently sued Boeing for moving a factory from a unionized state to a right-to-work state, which was displeasing to your union buddies.

Gibson Guitar was raided by the government because of some obscure law about wood that they import from India.
Coal users and producers have been on your hit list for years. You famously stated that you want to bankrupt the coal industry, because you think they are polluters. Your EPA recently issued new emission standards for coal-fired power plants, which will result in the closing of plants and the loss of jobs.

You apparently don’t like oil drillers, either, as you have stopped any new offshore oil exploration or drilling, loosing potentially tens of thousands of high paying jobs.

Mr. Obama, if you really care about jobs, just stop this jihad against companies and businesses.

Once you have stopped you job-killing behavior, Mr. Obama, here are two positive actions and one attitude adjustment you could undertake. These alone would have a game-changing effect on the U.S. economy and job creation.

Number 1. The U.S. has the highest corporate income tax rate in the world – 35%. Cut it. You could follow the example of Canada, and use their 16% rate. With this one action, you’d see so much increased business activity and the hiring that goes along with it that your head would swim.

Next, take a machete to onerous government regulations on business. A good start would be to cut the EPA staff by, say, half, and then go from there on a rampage through other government regulators. Companies would save millions, which they would be more than glad to use on business development. This, too, would promote economic expansion and job creation in a significant fashion.

Finally, Mr. Obama, have an epiphany. Start looking at companies and businesses of all sizes as the drivers of our economic prosperity that they are. Come to realize that the private economy, not government, creates wealth. Celebrate our free enterprise system and the magnificent benefits we all receive from it.

Big Education

2011-09-12T06:23:00.000-07:00

Radford University (RU) raised tuition by 8% this year, after an 11.3% increase last year. That’s a 19.3% increase in just two years. Other Virginia colleges and universities have had similar tuition increases in recent years, as have colleges around the country. One year of a college education now typically costs between $20,000 and $50,000, which comes out to $80,000 to $200,000 for the four years it normally takes to graduate.

My entire undergraduate education at the University of Virginia cost me a total of about 12 or $13,000 (that’s for tuition, fees, room, food, books, everything). Now at UVA, it’s going to cost you $25,000 a year, at least. That’s a 669% increase (since 1969).

Here is a test: Why do we not hear politicians, newspapers, TV talking heads, pundits, and all the chattering class fulminating about “big education” and price gouging and demanding investigations, and all that?

Exegesis on "ed"

2011-08-30T13:41:00.000-07:00

This is the one that pushed me over the edge.

Yesterday, I went to McDonald’s. This is something I do now and then as a reward for having done some especially hard work. I had been in the vineyard all day pruning the vines and picking off bad grapes one-by-one, getting ready for the harvest. So, on the way home, I stopped at McDonald’s to get a small burger, small fries, and a soda, a line-up that would be heavenly after a hot day in the field.

And then the trouble started.

I am particular about what is put on my hamburger. I want lettuce, tomato, and onion on it, but nothing else. Nothing else; especially not mayonnaise, mustard, or ketchup. So, on that day, I innocently ordered a burger with lettuce, tomato, and onion only, as I have done many times before. But this time, things progressed differently. The lovely young lady behind the counter asked if I wanted leaf lettuce or shred lettuce on my burger. I said that I’d have shredded lettuce, she punched it in, and it came up on the screen: shred lettuce. I saw it with my own two eyes: shred lettuce. I wasn’t just misunderstanding her; they were actually calling it “shred lettuce”.

So I now must address this issue, which has been tormenting me for years: the omission of “ed” in words that cry out for it to be there. I can no longer let it go. Which is one of my problems; I can’t let anything go. Really, I get concerned about such matters, because they are important to an inquisitive and disciplined mind. Yes, the proper use of “ed” is critical, because if we don’t pay attention to such details in matters of linguistics, before long we’ll all be talking baby talk.

By the way, I never talked baby talk to my babies. I conjugated verbs to them instead, but that’s another story.

Back to “shred lettuce”. Don’t the people running McDonald’s know that “shred lettuce” is what you do in order to get “shredded lettuce” to put on burgers? How can they not know this?

This is not the only time I’ve been haunted by a missing “ed”.

I actually saw a sign at a local produce stand that read, ”tree ripen peaches”. I am not making this up; it was right there on the sign. Don’t the fresh produce mongers know that “ripen” is the present tense of the verb “to ripen”; “ripened” is the past tense and is also used in the past perfect and future perfect tenses. “Ripen” means it’s occurring now; “ripened” means it has already happened. Voila! Peaches that have been left on the tree until they are fully ripened rather than being picked green are called “tree ripened”, because that’s what happened to them. I couldn’t sleep that night.

There are more. All of these are real life examples I have personally observed, much to my consternation.

When you drink cold tea with ice in it, you are consuming “iced tea”, not “ice tea”. Food that is put into cans is “canned food”. Staying with the food theme, potatoes that are mashed are ------ mashed potatoes! I have seen “mash potatoes” on a menu, and I had to bite my tongue in order to avoid making a scene. Don’t get me started on “bake potato”, because it won’t be pretty. How about “toss salad”, again, right there on a menu. What am I supposed to do, throw the salad around or something? No, it has already been “tossed” in the making, so it’s called “tossed salad”. How hard is this?

Thankfully, the cereal makers understand this issue and correctly label their boxes “shredded wheat” so I don’t have to start my day by foaming at the mouth on those mornings when I have this particular cereal for breakfast.

And if you do or make something the way it was done in days gone by, that item is “old fashioned”, as in: I am old fashioned about the proper use of the ed suffix.

Reliving all of these horrors has drained my psychic energy. I’m emotionally exhausted. But it has been worth it, because now I’m sure the world will understand this issue and it’s importance. Finally, everyone will diligently use, and pronounce in an exaggerated fashion, the “ed” that is so needed at the end of certain words.

Now, if I can just get people to understand that they don’t “graduate” high school or college, they “graduate FROM” a school, my work will be done.

Saved From The Edison Light Bulb

2011-08-22T08:52:00.000-07:00

While the politicians in Washington haven’t been able to do anything serious about unemployment, the economy, or the out-of-control government spending, it is reassuring to keep in mind that they can, in fact, solve big, important, pressing problems from time to time. Congress can rise to the occasion. For example, come January 1, Congress’s solution to one of the most serous problems to confront America in recent times will kick in. As of that date, a bill passed by Congress will save us from a deathly hazard that threatens “the nation’s future and collective health”, as the luminaries at the L. A. Times put it. That threat is the light bulb invented by Thomas Edison.

Take heart, my beleaguered friends. Your 401k may have tanked, you may not have a job or any prospects for one, the U.S. Government may have less cash on hand than Apple Computer, you may have to pay an amount for your little cherubim’s college education that would have gotten a building named after you in the old days, the comrads in Washington may want to raise your taxes to cover their profligate spending because you don’t pay what they consider to be your “fair share”, Iran may be about to nuke up, the country may lurch from economic and budgetary crisis to crisis, but at least you no longer have to worry about incandescent light bulbs. Those are the ones that have that horrid little filament in them. You know, the type of light bulbs we’ve been using for the last 130 years or so.

I’m sure you have been worried about them, unless you are a dim bulb indeed. As you no doubt know, incandescent light bulbs are energy hogs of the worst sort. They suck up energy like Fat Albert chowing down on the vittles over at the all-you-can-eat catfish and hush puppy shack. You have noticed that incandescent light bulbs do that, haven’t you? Pay no attention to your air conditioner or heat pump; it’s those evil light bulbs that are wreaking destruction on you and the world.

But you have been saved. You no longer have to live in fear of incandescent light bulbs. You can now rest easy; CFL’s (compact fluorescent lamps) have arrived just in the nick of time.

Umm, well, those CFL’s do have some very minor problems, but you needn’t worry your pretty little self about any of that.

What are those problems, you say? My, my, my, aren’t you the curious one. It’s nothing, really, nothing.

Oh, OK, since you insist.

First of all, CFL’s contain mercury, an extremely dangerous substance. It’s a small amount, to be sure, but it’s mercury none the less.

If, God forbid, one of those Earth-saving CFL’s happens to break in your house, people and pets must immediately evacuate (avoiding the “breakage area” on the way out), windows and/or doors should be opened to air the place out, central heating or air conditioning is to be turned off, and then you are to follow the seven step Hazmat clean-up procedure published by the EPA. If you use a vacuum cleaner in the clean-up process, the vacuum cleaner bag must be sealed in a plastic bag and immediately removed from the house.

Because of this problem with broken CFL’s, the EPA also recommends that a drop cloth be used when replacing a CFL, in case it is dropped and broken.

Since the CFL’s contain mercury, disposal is also a problem. Again, one CFL contains only a very small amount of mercury, but with the millions upon millions of them that will be used over the years, the total amount of mercury involved is significant. If the used bulbs are thrown into the trash, you’d better make sure you don’t use a trash compactor that will crush them. Even if the used CFL’s make it out to curbside unbroken, they will get deposited in a landfill to be pushed around by a bulldozer that will no doubt break them, and all of that mercury will eventually seep into the ground water. Or you could take your used CFL’s to a recycling center (being sure to tell them what you have), and let them worry about it.

Other than all of that mercury stuff, the CFL’s are just great.

Well, there is one other very trivial problem. Some CFL’s have been known to smoke or catch on fire. The August 2011 issue of Consumer Reports had an article under the title “Bulbs pose fire hazard” discussing this and identifying the CFL’s that have been recalled.

Did I mention that CFL’s typically cost several times as much as an incandescent bulb? No matter, you’ll recoup that extra cost by means of reduced electricity usage and longer bulb life.

Maybe.

The Department of Energy has said that mandatory use of CFL’s will save 15 quadrillion BTU’s over the next thirty years, or about 0.013 percent of U.S. energy usage. You will personally save pennies upon pennies in your monthly electric bill.

But your saving could well be eaten up by the greater cost of the CFL’s, since it turns out that they are not lasting nearly as long as expected. Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) in California has reported that CFL’s are lasting an average of 6.3 years verses the 9.4 that they initially estimated, or thirty-three percent less. An article in the Weekly Standard reported that a quarter of CFL’s only achieved about 40% of their projected life span. It seems that the life span tests were done under ideal conditions; e.g., turning the lamp on and leaving it on continuously. Surprise, surprise; in the real world, lights aren’t used that way. They are turned on and off, sometimes frequently, and that kind of usage reduces their life span. This is something that the incandescent people at GE and Sylvania have known for at least a hundred years, but it somehow escaped the notice of the CFL people until after they had convinced Congress to pass a law on the matter.

The last light bulb factory in the U.S. has closed, and it is most likely that CFL’s will ultimately be made only in China. The additional transportation costs should be factored into the CFL cost saving calculation, but it is difficult to do as accurately. The additional cost is there, though. And so much for “buying local”.

In any event, please join me in giving thanks that we live in a country where we have a government wise and caring enough to save us from incandescent light bulbs. That is of great comfort to me as I consider all of the other problems we face in this country.

Obama's Bus Tour

2011-08-18T14:25:00.000-07:00

President Obama has embarked on a bus tour of the Midwest. Who is the only other national political figure to go on a bus tour in the recent times? Sarah Palin, of course. And the media ridiculed her. But now, Obama is following Sarah Palin's lead.

Debt Ceiling Deal: Nothing Is Being Cut

2011-08-06T11:41:00.000-07:00

Here is some real eye-opening news.

During the last few weeks, there has been a non-stop soap opera in Washington about the federal government’s “debt ceiling”. Much of the debate has been about whether the government should cut spending or raise taxes or do some combination of both in order to get the deficit under control. We’ve heard about this plan that will cut X trillion in spending, and that plan that will cut Y trillion, and the compromise plan that will cut Z trillion.

You know all of that; it’s not news.

Here’s the news that has barely been mentioned because the big-spending, big government, career politicians don’t want you to be aware of it: Nothing is being cut, in any of these plans. Nothing.

Then why do we hear from supposedly legitimate news media that federal spending is being cut, with the only debate about how much, you ask. Dear reader, let me explain.

The federal budget is on autopilot that results in across-the-board increases occurring every year, automatically. It’s called “base line budgeting”, and here’s how it works.

Every year, the proposed federal budget increases from the previous year by eight percent. This increased budget proposal becomes the “baseline” for budget negotiations. If it is suggested that the budget should not increase by the proposed amount but by some lesser amount instead, which is still an increase over the previous year, that suggestion is scored by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) as a “cut”.

Stay with me on this, because it’s vitally important.

Let’s put some hypothetical numbers on it as an example. We’ll say that last year’s federal budget was $100 (you can put as many zeros on that as you want). The budget proposal for this year will come out initially as $108. If this proposed budget were reduced to, say, $105, it would be billed as a cut.

Hypothetical Example – Federal Budget Process
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Last year’s federal budget: $100
Initial budget proposal for this year (the baseline): $108
Final budget for this year: $105
Scored as a $3 cut.

That’s right, even though the federal budget went up from one year to the next in this example, it’s called a “cut” in politician-ese. That’s how baseline budgeting works; it’s designed to mislead the public so that politicians can claim they’re cutting the budget when in actuality the budget is going up.

Now for the coup-de-grace. Under all the plans being debated recently in Congress concerning the federal debt ceiling, government spending will rise across the board, in some estimates by seven to nine trillion dollars over the next ten years. Nothing is being cut! Yet we hear about how these various plans will cut spending by so many trillion. That’s the intended effect of baseline budgeting, letting politicians call an increase a cut.

Let’s move on to two other fundamental dishonesties that are rampant in the debt ceiling debate.

There has been a lot of talk about the U.S. Government’s credit rating possibly being lowered from AAA to AA+. What is this all about?

When a lender loans money to a borrower, the lender wants to know ahead of time the likelihood of the borrower being able to pay back the loan and the interest. That need led to credit ratings.

If a borrower is unable to pay the interest or principle on the loan, they are said to have defaulted on the loan.

Everyone probably knows about their credit score and how a good score makes it easier for an individual to borrow money and to get a lower interest rate. That’s because the higher a person’s credit score is, the less likely they will default on a loan.

Government entities (and companies) are rated in a similar manner by the major credit agencies, Moody’s and Standard and Poors (S&P). Triple A is the highest rating. The U.S. Government has always had a AAA rating because there is almost no chance that it won’t be able to pay the interest on borrowed money or the principle amount when the time comes.

Throughout this federal debt ceiling saga, one of the major reasons given as to why we must raise the debt ceiling is to prevent the federal government from defaulting on it’s loans (bonds), and to keep its credit rating from being downgraded.

The truth is that even if the debt ceiling is not raised, the government will not default on it’s bonds. There will still be tax money coming in, and there will be enough to pay the interest on the bonds, even though other areas of spending would have to go without in that scenario. But a default would not occur.

Next truth factoid: No matter which plan concerning the debt ceiling is finally adopted, the U.S. Government’s credit rating will go down. S&P has already said that neither of the final two proposed plans reduces federal spending enough such that Uncle Sam’s AAA rating can be maintained.

Here are the salient points we can distill out of all of this blathering and disingenuineness about the debt ceiling:
1. Nothing is being cut.
2. The federal government will not default on its loans (bonds).
3. The federal government’s credit rating will be downgraded no matter which debt ceiling plan Congress adopts since none of them are serious about balancing the federal budget.

Obama Voted Against Raising the Debt Ceiling As A Senator

2011-08-02T08:14:00.000-07:00

"The fact that we are here today to debate raising America's debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can't pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our government's reckless fiscal policies. Increasing America's debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that 'the buck stops here.' Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. America deserves better."

Barack Obama, circa 2006

Out Of Control Spending In Washington

2011-07-29T14:03:00.000-07:00

It's worse than we thought. The out of control spending in Washington is so bad that Apple Computer has more money than the U.S. Government. Yes, that's right. Uncle Sam is so flat out busted that one private company has more cash on hand the the U.S. Treasury.

Apple currently has $74.4 billion in cash on hand, but the Treasury Department now has only $73.7 billion (as reported by the BBC).

How did Apple mange to accumulate a larger cash horde than the U.S. Government? Apple routinely, month in-month out, year in-year out, spends less than it takes in.

Why is there a debt ceiling?

2011-07-22T11:02:00.000-07:00

As I watch the circus in Washington with regard to the Federal government’s so-called “debt ceiling”, I‘m now thinking that this issue is strange in one very fundamental, basic way.

We see various high ranking government officials and other supposedly smart people running around like Keystone Cops and hyperventilating about why we must, absolutely must, raise the Federal government’s debt limit on August 2 (not August 3), and that if we don’t, then the economy as we know it will cease to exist. We’ll drop off a cliff. The worldwide economy will implode, and we’ll never recover. It’ll be over, the end, fini, sayonara, the fat lady will sing, Armageddon will happen, etc. So we’re told by all of those people who are so much smarter than us.

Now here is the strange part. Ponder this: Why does the federal government have a debt limit, if once we reach it, we have no choice but to raise it? Why is the “debt ceiling” there in the first place if it’s not a ceiling at all?

“Debt” is, of course, borrowed money. That means it will have to be paid back some day. Think about buying a new truck. If you don’t have the cash to buy it, you can usually get a loan, and then you pay monthly payments, often for a long time, to pay the loan back.

Suppose you also buy a nice, new boat with another loan. Now, you have more monthly loan payments.

How about a house? Nobody has enough cash to buy a house, so you get a mortgage. More monthly payments.

And then there are those credit cards. Still more monthly payments.

If this keeps up, a person may reach a point where they just can’t make all of those monthly payments, and that’s a real problem. Foreclosure, repossession, nasty debt collectors calling, and other such unpleasantness will most likely ensue.

So the concept of limiting one’s debt seems like a good idea. Depending on the household income level, some specific number representing the total debt that a person or family can carry is established, and then they know not to go above that number in their total borrowing. This “debt ceiling” serves as a restraint on their borrowing, which is a good thing. It keeps them from getting “over extended”.

In concept, that is what a debt ceiling or limit is. It’s a tool for exercising basic, sound financial management by making sure that one doesn’t borrow too much money.

Currently, the federal government borrows about thirty-two cents out of every dollar it spends, so the debt is piling up. Right now, the total national debt is about fourteen trillion dollars, a lot of money to have to pay back to the lenders.

Let’s put that number in perspective.

The federal government currently is spending $3.8 trillion a year; of that, $1.2 trillion is borrowed. Percentage wise, thirty-two percent of the federal budget is borrowed.

The $14 trillion total national debt represents 3.6 years of the total federal government spending. In other words, if Uncle Sam did nothing but pay down the national debt, it would take 3.6 years to do it. Of course, that scenario is very hypothetical, since it means that all spending on the military, Congress, government agencies, Social Security and other entitlements, and everything else the federal government does would have to stop, which they won’t. In fact, because the government is borrowing money as described above, that total national debt figure isn’t going down at all; it’s going up.

Congress apparently realized that unlimited borrowing and spending on their part would lead to some very bad financial consequences. So Congress set a national debt limit, meaning that Congress couldn’t borrow more than that amount of money. I guess the intent was to force some self-restraint in borrowing and spending. But here we are, up against the $14 trillion debt limit and rising.

The big money sinks in the federal budget are Social Security and Medicare. The Social Security trustees estimate that, left on it’s current course, Social Security alone will run a deficit of $3.76 trillion in 2075. Add in Medicare, and you have a one-year deficit of $4.80 trillion, for just two entitlement programs. Those estimates are under an “intermediate” scenario, not a worst-case or best-case scenario.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is the total value of all goods and services produced in the entire country. That $4.80 trillion deficit will be somewhere between 24% and 50% of 2075 GDP, depending on the assumptions made.

Think about that. On the current trajectory, in 2075 we will spend between 24% and 50% of the value of everything produced in the country on two entitlement programs.

For you “sustainability” advocates, that is not sustainable.

Here are two conclusions we can draw from all of this.

First, since debt is caused by spending more money than is coming in, when a pre-defined debt limit is reached, shouldn’t spending be reduced?

Second, the only way to have any significant impact on federal spending is to make structural reforms to Social Security and Medicare.

No, raising taxes on the "rich" won’t solve the federal debt problem, especially something as meaningless as closing a tax loophole for corporate jets or some other such silliness. In previous columns, I have discussed who pays the most federal taxes, and space doesn’t allow me to repeat all of that here. But consider two factoids. One: In 2008, the last year for which IRS data is available, the top 50% of income earners paid 97% of all federal income tax. Two: If the feds took all of the taxable income of all people earning over $200,00, it would only pay the Social Security – Medicare - Medicaid bill for 2012, but not for any one year in the future since the costs of those programs are expected to rise rapidly. So increased taxes won’t do it.

Now we know the answer to the question. The debt ceiling is there to keep the Federal government from borrowing excessively, and once the limit is hit, spending needs to be cut.

The Great Toyota Hoax

2011-07-19T13:40:00.000-07:00

Do you remember the Toyota Crisis of 2010? It was one of the biggest stories of the year. There was a grave danger in Toyotas: Some electronic gadget in the cars was causing them to suddenly lurch forward at high speed. They couldn’t be brought under control even with the brake pedal; millions of people were at risk due to these demon machines. It was such a threat to so many Americans that no less than the Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood announced that “Toyotas are unsafe”. The Democrat controlled Congress jumped into action to avenge this death threat that had been inflicted on the American people. Hearings were held. Toyota executives were accused of lying and covering up the problem. The nation’s leading newspapers, news magazines, and television networks ran numerous stories on the “killing machines” theme. Toyota was fined $48.8 B for what the Obama administration called its inadequate response to the crisis. Toyotas stock price and market share declined.

Well, never mind. Earlier this year, after an exhaustive study by that very same Ray LaHood’s transportation department, assisted by NASA engineers, the U.S. government officially concluded that there was no evidence – no evidence whatsoever – of any mechanical or electronic defects in Toyotas that would cause sudden, unintentional acceleration.

Will their $48.8 billion be refunded?

Eat Your Peas

2011-07-14T17:35:00.001-07:00

President Obama has been telling us for some time that there must be shared sacrifice throughout the country, that we will all have to feel a little pain in order to solve the nation's problems. Now we know specifically what he means. We must all eat our peas.

More Environmental Dishonesty

2011-07-06T14:12:00.000-07:00

Recent news headlines: “As sea levels increase more rapidly, new report cites global warming”.

This news article talks about how the ice of Greenland and the Arctic is melting faster than expected, sea levels will rise more than previously projected, Florida will be under water, New York City subways will be flooded, etc. according to a report from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, the scientific arm of the eight nation Arctic Council. At the very end of the news article, in the very last sentence, we see this: “The melting of Arctic glaciers and ice caps, including Greenland’s massive ice sheet, is projected to help raise global sea levels by 35 to 63inches by 2100, the report said, although it noted that estimate is highly uncertain.”

Did you catch the “highly uncertain” part of that? Even the global warming wackos, in order to try to maintain some modicum of honesty, are forced to admit that their projections of doom are “highly uncertain”, but they bury this admission at the very end of the article after big headlines and the body of the article portray it all as established fact.

Declaring Our Independence From Environmental Tyranny

2011-06-29T18:30:00.000-07:00

Energy is essential to our way of life and our economy. Without energy, nothing happens. The availability of abundant, cheap energy has given us the highest standard of living in the world and enabled our economy to generate wealth on a scale the world has never before seen. Cheap energy is a blessing to us all.

My father and grandfather were coal miners in Virginia and West Virginia. My father was born in Dante, Virginia in the early nineteen hundreds when Dante was a booming coal town. He never graduated from high school. He met my mother when she went to Dante as a schoolteacher. After getting married, they went to Caretta, West Virginia where he worked at the mine for twelve years. They moved to Narrows when he got a job at the Virginian Railway power plant there, which is where I was born.

I graduated with Distinction from the University of Virginia with a degree in electrical engineering, and went on to get a Master’s Degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I entered the work force right at the beginning of the computer revolution, ending up in the high tech Mecca of Silicon Valley where I ultimately became Vice President of a software company.

After my first year in college, I was fortunate enough to get a summer job at AEP’s Glyn Lyn power plant. It was my first real job, and I was very glad to have it since I needed the money. I was paid $2.05 an hour, and thought I was raking it in.

The environment is now cleaner than it has ever been. To cite just one example, AEP has reduced pollution from its power plants by 80%.

But no matter how much progress is made, no matter how much the environment is cleaned up, it’s never enough. Restrictions must be made ever tighter and new bogeymen must be found.

So, the EPA has issued new emission rules for coal-fired power plants, and AEP will have to close five plants at a cost of 600 jobs and another ten to fifteen percent increase in electricity rates on top of the sixty-six percent increase that has occurred over the past few years.

The environmental extremists are overjoyed, just ecstatic, that finally those plants will be closed and electricity rates can go up. Diana Christopulos, president of the Roanoke Valley Cool Cities Coalition, has been quoted as saying, ”This is truly good news ----“ . The Roanoke Times could barely conceal its glee in an editorial on June 16.

Another local resident made a fool of himself recently in a screed against Rep. Morgan Griffith. This person makes the absurd argument that new EPA rules will actually create hundreds of thousand of new jobs. Closing power plants will create jobs? Also in his piece, he rants about toxic pollutants, spewing, poisoning our environment, etc. But the picture of the Glen Lyn power plant included with his article shows a pristine surrounding environment. The air is clean, the river is clean, there are lots of green trees and lush vegetation, right there beside the power plant that is so terrifying to him! Comical.

Environmental extremists are tyrants. No matter what the cost, they demand that we drive cars that they approve of; that we use forms of energy that they approve of; that we use light bulbs, water faucets, washing machines, windows, etc. that they approve of; that we use public transportation; that we live where they dictate (in sustainable “hubs”); and it goes on and on. They arrogantly tell us that we are guilty, that we have been “complicit”.

Even worse, if we don’t willingly follow their mandates, they try to use the government (EPA) to force their environmental tyranny upon us.

We Virginians have a long and storied history of standing up to tyrants, going all the way back to the American Revolution. Patrick Henry said, “Give me liberty or give me death.” Our state flag shows a depiction of Liberty vanquishing Tyranny, with the words, ”Sic Semper Tyrannis”. “Thus Always to Tyrants”.

I am tired of sanctimonious, self-righteous, pointy-headed environmental do-gooder elitists who live in ivory towers telling the rest of us how to live our lives because they said so.

It’s time we Virginians started dealing with the environmental tyrants the same way we have dealt with all tyrants who have wanted to take away our freedoms. We must now declare our independence from them, and send them packing.

It starts here and now.

2012 Republican Strategy Starts To Take Shape

2011-06-22T14:13:00.000-07:00

At a three day party rally in New Orleans (June 16 – 18), a Republican strategy for the 2012 Presidential election started solidifying: Hang the economy, unemployment, federal budget deficit, out-of-control spending, Obamacare, stimulus, TARP, bailouts, and unending wars around Obama’s neck like albatrosses and let them rot there until November, 2012. This will all be put against a backdrop of patriotism and American exceptionalism.

Much to the chagrin of the liberal media elites and the Democrats, the Republican candidates for the party’s nomination in 2012 are not attacking each other, but rather are so far unanimously focused on attacking Obama. The Republicans’ opposition are praying that the Republicans will have a vicious street fight for the nomination so that whoever emerges will be bloodied to the point of being a weak candidate. It does not appear as though that will happen.

Haley Barbour, Governor of Mississippi but not a presidential candidate, said that the 2012 election will be about Obama’s record. He said bigger government means a smaller economy. On energy, he pointed out that energy is 100% of the American economy, but yet Obama wants to drive up the price of the domestic supply. He also called for party unity, saying whoever the Republican nominee turns out to be, he/she will be many times better than Obama. His final advice for Republicans between now and November 2012 was to remember that, “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing”, meaning Obama’s record.

Herman Cain played off of the “I have a dream” theme, saying he was taught to believe in God, yourself, and America. He took a jab at the media by saying that the people are going to elect the next President, not the media. He focused on the economy and “common sense solutions”. He recounted that the Founding Fathers gave us a new form of government based upon the exceptional idea that our human rights come from God, not from the king or the government, and that now it is up to us to be the “Defending Fathers” to preserve that.

From Michele Bachman we heard that peace comes from strength. She also pointed out that the per capita share of the national debt has gone from $35,000 to $46,000 so far with Obama, a 31% increase. She talked about fiscal conservatism and social conservatism, and noted that she had founded the Congressional Tea Party Caucus.

Rick Santorum is in a class by himself. He talked about the economy, as did all the others. He also explained how the Marcellus share in Pennsylvania and elsewhere contains the largest natural reserve in the world. But after talking about those and some other specific issue, he moved into something like a spiritual realm. He started taking in a whisper, and the room became so quiet that you could literary hear a pin drop. He said things like, “In 2012, we don’t need a President we can believe in, we need a President who believes in us”. “Passionate” is not the right word to describe him, although he is that. Maybe ethereal. I don’t think being President is his destiny, but he does seem to have one.

Ron Paul called for abolishing the Federal Reserve.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich promised to end the 80 year rule of the left in the United States.

Former Louisiana Governor and current bank CEO Buddy Roemer decried money in politics. He wants to downsize government (e.g., eliminate the Department of Energy), reduce spending, and enact the fair tax. He also talked about “greedy” corporations, a little odd juxtaposed with his other comments. He is a declared candidate for the presidential nomination, but is given little chance.

Jeff Landry, Representative from Louisiana and not a candidate for the nomination, said, “As government expands, liberty contracts.”

Texas Governor Rick Perry is not a declared candidate but will probably soon be. He emphasized his work as the longest tenured Governor of Texas ever. He lambasted Obama, at one point saying, “The arrogance of the Obama administration is an affront to every freedom-loving American and to every private sector job in this country.”

Mitt Romney, considered by some to be the frontrunner for the nomination, did not attend. Former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman did not attend either; he declared his candidacy after the conference.

Palin Derangement Syndrome

2011-06-17T19:03:00.000-07:00

She’s baaaack!

The effect that Sarah Palin continues to have on liberals and the media elites is astonishing. They are obsessed with her. They are moths drawn to light; they can’t help themselves from following her around even though they detest her. It’s worse than that. It’s gotten to the point of being psychotic, as though they are possessed by some demon that forces them to do irrational and downright foolish things. I have a vision of them rolling on the floor, sputtering: “Puh --- puh --- puh ---- Palinnnnnnnnnnn, why dost thou torment us?” Sarah stretches out her arm in that signature wave of hers and says, “Media, get thee behind me.”

Mrs. Palin has been on a bus tour recently. As of this writing, she has not announced that she is running for office, but she is drawing huge crowds everywhere. And the media has flipped out.

Palin’s aides have refused to publish the tour’s itinerary, forcing anyone trying to cover it to engage in a Keystone Cops routine of chasing her bus down the freeway in order to be there when she gets out and says something. At one point, fifty (yes, fifty) reporters pressed her unsuccessfully for details of future stops. Mrs. Palin said she didn’t think she owed anything to the media. That’s putting it diplomatically, considering the despicable manner in which the media has treated her and her family for the last three years.

Sarah has now completely turned the tables and is actually playing with them. The bus tour circus may have reached its apogee in Gettysburg when Mrs. Palin used the tour bus as a decoy to lure a bunch of reporters to the back door of her hotel while she went quietly out of another entrance to visit the battlefield. The bus, meanwhile, was driving around in circles, followed by a caravan of reporters and others. Eventually, Sarah did get on the bus and headed for Dillsburg with media vehicles in hot pursuit. As she neared Philadelphia, the media caravan still following, a couple of local news helicopters flew overhead to film the spectacle.

This is from the very same media which called her an idiot, stupid, ignorant, a yahoo, etc. If any of that is true, why do they care where she goes or what she says?

MSNBC’s Martin Bashir made a complete fool of himself recently when he told viewers that Palin’s bus tour is illegal because the bus has American flags painted on it! He really said that, on national TV. You see, there is some federal law that says the U.S. flag can’t be used in advertising, or something like that. No more Fourth of July fireworks sales, I guess. According to Mr. Bashir’s logic, the flag will also have to banned from all political rallies from now on since they raise money at those events.

That’s what seeing Saran Palin riding around in a bus painted with images of the Stars and Stripes does to the media elites; they turn into blithering idiots.

There’s more. On Politico.com, Kasie Hunt published a piece that lambastes Palin and her bus tour because the two SUV’s Palin uses locally, get ready , “--- flew right past a flashing sign informing them they were going 45 in a 35 mph zone.” That’s right, the bus tour is a rolling menace. According to the Politico, it’s horrors include speeding; making sudden lane changes; not giving turn signals; almost hitting a biker; running stop lights; creating traffic jams. Strangely enough, amidst all of this hell on wheels from Mrs. Palin’s bus tour, the police have issued no tickets.

Chris Matthews in his June 2 “Hardball” show on MSNBC (Why are so many of these nut cases on MSNBC?) said that Sarah Palin is the most divisive figure since Abraham Lincoln “caused” the Civil War. Matthews fulminated that “Sarah Palin went right into New Hampshire, serving as a human grenade -----.” This is “Palin Derangement Syndrome” on full display.

Here’s how good Sarah Palin has become at this political game. One hour before Mitt Romney made his official announcement, in New Hampshire, that he was running for President, Sarah Palin was in Romney’s home state of Massachusetts criticizing Romneycare, one of Romney’s signature achievements as governor of that state. Then Saran Barracuda, the Pit Bull with lipstick, “went right into New Hampshire”, as Matthews put it, to annihilate Romney’s big announcement. And she isn’t even running.

There was a large article by Kimberly Strassel in the June 3 edition of the Wall Street Journal on Sarah Palin. Ms. Strassel goes on at length about how Mrs. Palin has not taken advantage of the time since 2008 to “redefine herself”. She hasn’t boned up on the issues; she hasn’t educated herself; she hasn’t built a “brilliant” team; she hasn’t accomplished anything (never mind that million seller book and TV series).

They’re talking about Palin on ABC, where Good Morning America correspondent John Berman dismissed her bus tour as a “magical mystery bus”, and went on to say she makes Romney appear as a “more safe, a more secure, a more reasonable candidate”. Let’s see, now, was that before or after she blew up his announcement?

She ate pizza with The Donald. She went to a clambake in New Hampshire. Who knows where she will pop up next? It’s all so terrifying! No one is safe! Aughhhhhhhh!

Here’s what we learn from all of this. Either the liberal media is deranged when it comes to Sarah Palin, or they discern something in her that they see as a serious threat to their anointed candidates.

Sabato's Crystal Ball

2011-06-09T13:11:00.000-07:00

This is interesting, but keep in mind that the author is a liberal Democrat. Copy and paste the link.

http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/

The Diversity of the Republican Party

2011-06-06T18:32:00.000-07:00

The presidential campaign season is upon us. On the Republican side, the field is crowded and wide open. Watching and reading about all of these contenders, it struck me that this is a very diverse group of people. And the more I researched the candidates, the more intriguing it became. There are some top tier candidates, so to speak, but no “crowned princes/princesses”. Many of the candidates represent what is best about America: Ordinary people who have achieved extraordinary things; people who through their God-given talents and their own hard work, have gone far in life. Some of the candidates are lawyers, of course, but we also have everything from the college professor to the air force pilot to the doctor to the beauty queen to the real estate mogul to the corporate CEO to the Godfather of pizza (whose mother was a cleaning lady, by the way).

Here is a synopsis of the background of most of the candidates or potential candidates.

Mitt Romney (64)
Romney was born and raised in Michigan. Romney is a corporate executive turned politician. He is the son of a corporate CEO and former governor of Michigan. He is highly educated and very successful in the corporate world, and he is quite wealthy. He is a Mormon and is married with four children.

Romney ran for U.S. Senate against Ted Kennedy and lost in 1994. In 2002, he was elected Governor of Massachusetts. He improved the state’s finances via spending cuts and increases in fees. One of his signature accomplishments as governor was the landmark Massachusetts health care reform, which provided near-universal health access via subsidies and state-level mandates.

In 2008, Romney ran for the Republican Presidential nomination and did well, but dropped out (McCain became the nominee).

Tim Pawlenty (51)
Pawlenty is a lawyer who got into politics at an early age and has been there ever since. He has lived his whole life in Minnesota. He is married with two daughters. He was raised as a Roman Catholic but converted to Evangelical Christian, probably due to his wife.

His career includes Eagan City Planning Commission, Eagan City Council (at the age of 28), state Representative (four terms), and Governor of Minnesota (two terms). He eliminated the state budget deficit by cutting spending and using earmarked funds. In 2007 and 2008, he served as the chairman of the National Governor’s Conference.

Pawlenty was closely involved with McCain’s presidential campaign in 2008, and began early steps for his own run in late 2009.

Rick Santorum (53)
Santorum was born in Winchester, Virginia, and grew up in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Illinois. He is married with seven children. His wife also had another child born prematurely that lived only two hours. He is Roman Catholic.

Santorum has BA, MBA, and JD degrees. He practiced law for four years in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania before being elected to the House of Representatives in 1990. In 1994, he was elected to the U.S. Senate, at the age of 36. In 2006, he failed to win re-election in an election fraught with much controversy.

Sarah Palin (47)
Palin was born in Idaho but her family moved to Alaska when she was a few months old, and she’s been there ever since. In 1984, she came in third in the Miss Alaska beauty pageant. She attended a number of colleges and community colleges, ultimately receiving a BA from the University of Idaho in 1987. She worked briefly as a sportscaster and sports reporter. In 1988, she eloped with her high school sweetheart; they now have five children.

Starting in 1992, she was elected to the Wasilla City Council twice, then she was elected mayor of Wasilla for two terms. From 2003 to 2006, she held various appointed positions in Alaskan government. In 2006, she became the state’s first female governor and the youngest governor in Alaska’s history. In 2008, she was the Republican nominee for Vice President on the McCain ticket.

Her book Going Rogue has sold more than two million copies.

Herman Cain (45)
Cain was born in Memphis, Tennessee and raised in Georgia. His mother was a cleaner and his father was a chauffer. Cain received a BA in math and a Master’s degree in computer science while working full time for the Department of the Navy. He worked for Coca-Cola, Pillsbury, Burger King, and ended his corporate career as CEO of Godfather’s Pizza. After turning Godfather’s around, he lead a group of investors that bought Godfather’s Pizza. He was a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and it’s Chairman. In 1996, he became CEO of the National Restaurant Association. He hosted The Herman Cain Show on talk radio until February, 2011.

He is married with two children, and is a Southern Baptist.

Ron Paul (75)
Ron Paul is a native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and graduate of Gettysburg College and the Duke University School of Medicine. Paul served as a flight surgeon in the U.S. Air Force from 1963 until 1968, during the Vietnam War. He worked as an obstetrician and gynecologist in Texas in the 1960s and 1970s. He was first elected to Congress in 1978. He has the most conservative voting record of any member of Congress since 1937. He has run for President three times. He has been described as a conservative, Constitutionalist, and Libertarian.

He is married with five children, and is a Baptist. His son, Rand Paul, was elected Senator from Kentucky in 2010.

Newt Gingrich (67)
Gingrich is a college professor turned politician. He was born in Harrisburg, PA in a military family. The family moved a number of times while he was growing up; he graduated from high school in Columbus , Georgia.

Gingrich has been married three times. He was a Southern Baptist but converted to Catholicism.

Gingrich represented Georgia’s 6th congressional district from 1979 to 1999. He served as Speaker of the House form 1995 to 1999. In 1995, Times Magazine selected him as “Person of the Year” for his role in leading the Republican Revolution in the house, ending 40 years of the Democrat Party being the majority. In the 1994 campaign season, Gingrich came up with the “Contract With America”, which contained ten policies that Republicans promised to bring to a vote on the House floor if they won the election, which they did. Congress fulfilled Gingrich's Contract promise to bring all ten of the Contract's issues to a vote within the first 100 days of the session, even though most legislation was initially held up in the Senate. Many aspects of the proposal were implemented in subsequent legislation.

By 1998, Gingrich had become a highly visible and polarizing figure in the national public's eye, due to political ethics lapses and events in his personal life .Gingrich announced on November 6, 1998 that he would not only stand down as Speaker of the House, but would leave the House as well. He had been handily reelected to an 11th term in that election, but declined to take his seat. He has since maintained a career as a political commentator, public speaker, and author.

Rick Perry (61)
Perry is a fifth generation Texan. He grew up on a ranch in West Texas and attended Texas A&M. After graduation, he was commissioned into the Air Force and flew C-130’s in the U.S., Middle East, and Europe. In 1977, he returned to Texas and went in to the cotton farming business with his father.

Perry served in the Texas legislature as a Democrat starting in 1984. In 1989, he switched to the Republican Party. He also was elected as Texas Agricultural Commissioner, and Lieutenant Governor. He became Governor in 2000 when George Bush resigned to become President. Perry holds all records for Texas gubernatorial tenure. He was elected to full terms in 2002, 2006 and 2010, an unprecedented feat in Texas political history. He served as Chairman of the Republican Governors Association in 2008.

Perry is married to his high school sweetheart; they have two children. He is a Methodist.

Michele Bachman (55)
Bachman was born Michele Marie Amble in Waterloo, Iowa into a family of “Norwegian Lutheran Democrats”. After her parents divorced, she was raised by her mother. She graduated from Winona State University and received law degrees from Oral Roberts University and William & Mary. She worked as a tax attorney for the IRS from 1988 to 1993. She left that position to become a full time mother.

Bachman has been a tea party, pro-life, and defense of marriage activist. In 2000, Bachman defeated an 18 year incumbent to be elected to the Minnesota Senate. Since 2007, she has served in the U.S. House of Representatives. She is a founder of the House Tea Party Caucus.

Donald Trump (64)
Trump is the fourth of five children of Fred Trump, a real-estate tycoon and developer based in New York City. Donald was inspired to follow his father into real-estate development, and began working on projects for his father's real-estate firm while still in college. Upon his graduation from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in1968, Trump formally joined his father's company, Elizabeth Trump & Son. He took the helm in 1971 and renamed it The Trump Organization.
His extravagant lifestyle and outspoken manner have made him a celebrity for years.

Trump has done many real estate deals in New York City and elsewhere. He saw early success, but then ran into some financial and legal difficulties. These matters were worked through and he has had a resurgence in the last few years.

His television show “The Apprentice” is highly successful; he is now one of the highest paid TV personalities. In 2007, Trump received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Trump has dropped out of the race, but then said he might get back in if no “suitable” candidate emerges.

There are others I haven’t mentioned: Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York City and the 13th richest person in America; Mitch Daniels, Governor of Indiana (who has dropped out of the race); Ron Hunstman, Governor of Utah; Paul Ryan, the man who tackled the federal budget.

This race is going to be fun ----- let ‘er rip!!!!!

Too Big To Fail: What A Joke!

2011-06-02T15:10:00.001-07:00

I can’t be the only one growing tired of the constant barrage of the use of the word “crisis” by elected officials and the media, especially when it comes to issues regarding our economy and future prosperity. Let’s consider what “We The People” have been through, and been told, over the last three years.

George W. Bush came to us first during the financial “crisis” and told us that the banking system in the United States was on the verge of collapse. His advisors, and talking heads on television, began to tell us that if we didn’t cough up a lot of cash, then the system would collapse and we would enter into a second Great Depression. Because of all the bad loans on the books, and financial companies leveraging their assets to ridiculous levels (mostly due to subprime mortgages), and terrible business practices the term, “too big to fail” was introduced into our daily lives. We were told that if companies that had taken on too much risk were allowed to fail our economy would collapse as the media painted pictures of Depression-era bread lines.

So then President Bush and his advisors told us that we would have to pay for a program called TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) to the tune of about $700 billion, you know…to bail out those companies that are inefficient and make bad decisions. In 2008 the good folks on Main Street that pay taxes were already hard pressed with a slowing economy, and now this hit the fan. GM and Chrysler were also collapsing because of bad decisions by management regardless of how many cars they sold. AIG was on the verge of going under and two of Wall Street’s legendary firms, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, were the first two to officially close their doors. That was enough to scare Wall Street, Washington, and many investors. The stock market collapsed about 50% from the fall of 2007.

We were told that the taxpayer would probably make money from the massive bailouts over time as the economy recovered and the “toxic” assets on bank and corporate balance sheets were sold. And the government may have recouped a big portion already, but I don’t see an equivalent amount of tax cuts going to Americans. The same tax structure was voted on to be kept in place. However, Neil Barofsky, Special Inspector General for the TARP fund went on record to say, “Inadequate oversight and insufficient information about what companies are doing with the money leaves the program open to fraud, including conflicts of interest facing fund managers, collusion between participants and vulnerabilities to money laundering.” All of a sudden I didn’t feel so confident that the American people would ever know the truth about whether they lost money or made money. Even if they made money, I don’t see Washington willing to cut taxes one bit to send that money back to the taxpayer that foots all the bills.

Then when we supposedly got out of the mess of the bailouts President Obama and other elected officials quickly sold us on why we needed to pass a nearly $1 trillion dollar stimulus bill to pump up the economy. Financial analyst and economist hit the airwaves telling us that if we didn’t pass the bill then the unemployment rate would skyrocket. We had just gone from one crisis to another. And if we passed the stimulus (an amount never heard of before) then we would keep our national unemployment rate under 8%. In hindsight that is completely laughable. The rate went to well over 10% (by Washington’s calculations) and still remains above 9% now. Many economists will tell you that the real unemployment rate, when you consider the underemployed and those that have stopped looking for work, is closer to 15%. I agree with that number, although it might even be higher. What was supposed to kick start the economy only ended up giving it a light shove.

So after expanding the debt level enormously, officials in Washington, primarily with the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department, told us that the economy needed a strong jolt, so they began the cycle of quantitative easing. I highlighted this topic in my previous commentaries on debt, and spelled out the dangers of such action and how it has failed when tried in other countries such as post WWI Germany and more recently in Argentina.

The second round of the FED’s quantitative easing is coming to an end, and it only cost you an additional $600 billion. It has been an absolute failure. Did it create some jobs? Yes. Analysts (according to a www.marketwatch.com article) estimate that it helped to create about 700,000 jobs at a cost of about $850,000 each. Does that sound like a success to you? After all, you pay taxes and you have to eventually foot the bill for this, too. The quantitative easing also threw a lot of cheap money out there that has propped up the stock market, but not the economy. It has certainly helped to increase inflation despite what those at the Federal Reserve tell you. We were told that it was vital to do this in order to jump start the economy. How’s the economy looking from your point of view?

This summer we’ll be upon another instance where the word “crisis” will be tossed around. This time it will be over the budget. I’d bet a nickel that our elected officials will cry wolf and insist on raising the debt ceiling again. The only problem is that they will never stop. Either they make tough choices now and tackle serious issues, or at some point in the near future those around the world will be talking about America’s debt the way we are talking about Greece…a default and total economic collapse.

J.C. Schweingrouber, Portfolio Manager
Virginia Financial Innovation Corporation
(276) 623-2654
www.vafic.com

More Tolerance and Compassion From Liberals

2011-05-30T09:28:00.000-07:00

Here is the latest manifestation of the compassion and tolerance and inclusiveness of liberals. Ed Schultz has a prime time (10:00 p.m.) show on MSNBC, the "Ed Show". On May 24, he called noted conservative activist Laura Ingram a "right wing slut". He them immediately apologized and took a self-imposed one week leave without pay.

This also lays bare the breath-taking media double-standard. While they ignore this latest outpouring of hate form a liberal, I want you to do a little thought experiment. What would the media response be if Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity or Neil Boortz or any prominent conservative referred to, say, Hillary Clinton as a left wing slut? What would the response be in the new media then? But when a liberal does it ----- complete silence.

"Cash For Clunkers" Pushes Up Used Car Prices

2011-05-26T14:50:00.000-07:00

Back when Congress passed one of the most idiotic laws in the history of the country, cash-for-clunkers, I pointed out that one of it’s likely effects would be to drive up the price of used cars. Now that has happened. In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, it is reported at length that used car prices have gone up dramatically. “Prices for used cars hit a record high in April and are poised to go even higher ----.”

I scored a bulls-eye on that one.

FEMA Tells Virginia To Take A Hike

2011-05-21T17:48:00.000-07:00

Many people are struggling to understand FEMA’s decision to deny disaster assistance funds to Virginia; it seems to make no sense. Dear reader, let me explain. In 2009, Virginians elected a Republican governor, a Republican lieutenant governor, and a Republican attorney general. In 2010, voters in Southwest Virginia turned a 28 year incumbent Democrat U.S. Representative out of office and installed a Republican.

Obama is on the record as saying that Democrats should punish their enemies.

Obama's New Energy Policy

2011-05-18T14:38:00.000-07:00

President Obama announced his new energy policy this week; he says he wants to ramp up domestic oil production. "Drill Baby Drill", in other words.

Big Bird Loving Liberals Go Wild

2011-05-14T11:58:00.000-07:00

Hell hath no fury like a liberal spurned.

It is truly amusing, as well as very telling, to watch the left-wing liberals squeal like stuck pigs over reductions in state funding for public broadcasting (PBS). Based upon what I’ve seen in the Roanoke Times of late, I have visions of them rolling on the ground, foaming at the mouth, sputtering “Puh ----puh, puh puh, P – B - S. Not PBS!!!! “

On May 5, the Times ran an editorial (“McDonnell’s final budget shot”) bemoaning Gov. McDonnell’s line item veto of a $424,000 increase in PBS funding for educational programming. Note the word “increase” there. In that editorial, the Times uses the word “cut” five times, while fully admitting that what happened was the elimination of an increase. Regardless of what one may think of PBS, it is instructive to note that in the minds of big government liberals, eliminating an increase is a cut. The editorial goes on to note that PBS in Virginia will still, after the “cut” of an increase, receive $3.18 million of your tax dollars.

Three days later, Dan Casey just goes nuts in his Times column (“PBS cut nothing to crow about”). I don’t want to hear any more of you Liberals trying to denigrate Conservatives with your talk about birthers and global warmers and what-not-ers when you’ve got Casey spouting off in public about the conspiratorial machinations of McDonnell and Republicans concerning the 2012 Presidential election. I follow this stuff pretty closely, and nowhere have I seen or heard anyone in the national media mention McDonnell as possibly running for President. In the Fox News debate of Republican Presidential contenders the other night, McDonnell wasn’t there or even talked about for not being there. I have asked McDonnell personally myself about this, and have been told he has no plans to run. Yet here is Casey claiming that such an insignificant event as a line item veto of $424,000 in the state budget is McDonnell’s opening move in his run for the President. Laughable.

And then the Times really loses it on May 10 by running a cartoon showing heavily armed soldiers (Navy SEALS, not doubt), receiving orders form McDonnell to “take out PBS.” It is also very telling that the Times impugns the motives of anyone who dares to disagree with them by publically saying those people are willing, nay, anxious, to resort to extreme violence. Oh yes, today McDonnell exercises his line item veto authority, as every governor does, and tomorrow he’ll be sending out the commandos to the PBS offices.

This cartoon is highly offensive and I demand an apology from the Times.

Liberals, take three deep breaths and listen to me carefully: Tomorrow, the sun will rise.

In order to fully understand the PBS issue, we must review some history.

PBS was started in 1970 as an attempt to provide additional television programming content that normally wouldn’t be found on the commercial TV stations at that time. This was due to the nature of the TV industry in that era. There was no cable (much less satellite) TV; virtually all TV programs came over the air from three privately owned national networks (ABC, NBC, CBS). These networks were commercial enterprises and were financially viable by means of the selling of on-air commercials. That meant that they were primarily interested in broadcasting programs that a lot of people would want to watch.

It was felt by many that an alternative TV outlet was needed that could carry programs that were not totally dependent on their ability to sell commercials for their existence, perhaps more educational programs. So Congress established PBS and subsidized it.

As a side note, I remember when my family got its first TV. I was about nine years old. The set was large and bulky, and we got a grand total of ------ one ------ channel from an antenna on the roof of the house.

Now, of course, things are much different. We have cable TV, satellite TV, hundreds of channels, the internet, YouTube, HULU, DVD’s, etc. We have Animal Planet, The History Channel, A&E, Discovery Channel, Healthy Living Channel, all of the news channels, etc. ad nauseum.

It is not realistic to now claim that society or our education system cannot, in any stretch of the imagination, continue to function effectively without PBS. The world has changed in the last forty years, and PBS is now an anachronism. If some people want to preserve it, have at it (send your check to --- well, look it up). But please, behave like adults rather than throwing childish hissy-fits. And, especially, don’t tell the rest of us that we have to pay for your favorite TV channel with our tax dollars.

Water Boarding vs. Being Shot In The Head

2011-05-13T13:59:00.001-07:00

For years while Republican George Bush was President, Democrats railed incessantly about how water boarding was torture, as bad as anything that happened in the gulags, not consistent with our American values, Bush and Cheney were war criminals for allowing this to happen, etc. ad nauseum.

Now that there is a Democrat in the White House, the very same Democrats who insisted that terrorists could not be water boarded because it was an inhumane practice apparently have no problem with an unarmed terrorist being shot in cold blood and his body dumped in the ocean.

Climate Refugees, Not Found

2011-05-10T13:32:00.000-07:00

From The Wall Street Journal:

In 2005, the U.N. Environmental Program (UNEP) published a color-coded map under the headline "Fifty million climate refugees by 2010." The primary source for the prediction was a 2005 paper by environmental scientist Norman Myers.

Six years later, this flood of refugees is nowhere to be found, global average temperatures are about where they were when the prediction was made - and the U.N. has done a vanishing act of it s own, wiping the inconvenient map from its servers.

The map, which still can be found elsewhere on the Web, disappeared from the program's website sometime after April 11, when Gavin Atkins asked on AsianCorrespondent.com: "What happened to the climate refugees?" It's now 2011 and, as Mr. Atkins points out, many of the locales that the map identified as likely sources of climate refugees are "not only not losing people, they are actually among the fastest growing regions in the world."

The program's spokesman tells us that the map vanished because "it's not a UNEP prediction. ...that graphic did not represent UNEP views and was an oversimplification of UNEP views." He added that the program would like to publish a clarification, now that journalists are "making hay of it."

The climate-refugee prediction isn't the first global warming-related claim that has turned out to be laughable, and everyone can make mistakes. More troubling is the impulse among some advocates of the global warming alarmism to assert that they never said what they definitely said before the evidence went against them.

These columns have asked for some time how anyone can still manage to take the U.N.-led climate crowd seriously. Maybe the more pertinent question is whether the climateers have ever taken the public's intelligence seriously.

To Every Thing There Is A Season

2011-05-04T07:19:00.000-07:00

“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to reap;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to breakdown, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.”

Ecclesiastes 3: 1 – 8

On September 11, 2001, as I was getting dressed to go to work, my wife was fixing breakfast while watching the news on TV. She came into the bedroom and said that a plane had gone into the World Trade Center. I assumed it was some wacko in a small, private plane or something, and I thought to myself, “How much damage can that do?” So, I went about getting ready for the day’s work. Then, as I walked into the kitchen to sit down for breakfast, I happened to look at the TV and saw the second plane hit the buildings. Now my thought was, “Wait, that’s a big plane!”.

We all know the rest of the story.

Instead of writing my usual type of column this time, it seems appropriate to do something different. As I think back to that day, some memories and images are still vivid. Here are some vignettes of my remembrances from that day and afterwards.
- Firemen going into the buildings as the office workers were coming out, running for their lives.
- The poignant spectacle of people jumping from the top floors of the buildings, since there was no escape route and their only alternative was to be burned alive.
- The building collapsing on itself, with people running away in the streets from the huge dust cloud coming their way, like something out of a space invaders movie.
- When I got to the office, how odd and abnormal it was that no airplanes were landing at the nearby, major airport.
- People on the doomed planes calling their loved ones on cell phones to say goodbye.
- Learning the story of the plane that was apparently trying to hit the White House but which was brought down in the Pennsylvania countryside by some of the passengers who stormed the cockpit.
- An interdenominational prayer service at a Mosque in the city where I lived.
- The feeling of oneness and unity and solemnity we had as a country.
- President Bush telling the world that if they weren’t with us in our war on terror, then they were against us.
- People dancing in the streets in the Arab world.

This was the second “day of infamy” experienced by America. And now, as with the first, it has been avenged.

I am so proud of our armed forces, and especially the Navy Seals who executed this raid flawlessly. But they couldn’t have done it alone. The intelligence community also deserves our praise, as do all of the people in various supporting roles.

And now, let us once again remember those who died on 911 and say another little prayer for them and their families. Let us vow that they shall not have died in vain, that America will continue to be strong, free, a place where all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, a shining city on a hill, the world’s last best hope.

God bless America, land that I love.

Sarah Palin On The Budget Wars

2011-04-25T14:45:00.000-07:00

Sarah Palin said recently that, in their budget battles, the Republicans in Congress need to learn how to fight like a girl.

Now that is a great line.

Straight Talk On The Budget

2011-04-21T14:01:00.000-07:00

Yes, we do have a serious federal budget deficit problem. The deficit this year alone is $1.5 trillion. The entire federal debt is close to $14 trillion, and it has tripled since Obama took office.

That level of debt is unsustainable.

Let’s get back to basics for a minute. A “deficit” occurs when you spend more than you have.

Consider credit cards. A person can go on a shopping spree and run up a big credit card bill without actually having the money in hand. Afterwards, they will have a bunch of goodies, but they also have a big bill to pay. Maybe next month, they do the same thing. Now they have even more goodies, but an even bigger credit card bill. At some point, the whole operation collapses. They hit the limit of their credit card, they can’t pay the monthly payments, collection agencies are calling, and it’s a huge mess.

That’s what’s happening in Washington, except that when the government hits it’s credit limit, they just raise the limit.

President Obama gave a speech recently outlining his proposal to significantly reduce the federal budget deficit. In that speech, he made a point of saying that politicians are prone to talking about reducing waste as a way of cutting spending, but that, realistically, the budget deficit now is so large that just cutting waste will not solve the problem. He then went on to say that a key component of his deficit reduction plan is to reduce the cost of Medicare, Medicaid, and the military by finding ways for them to operate more efficiently. Reducing waste, in other words. So in the first part of his speech, he said that focusing on waste won’t do it, and then he outlined a plan that is primarily based upon reducing waste.

The President’s plan also calls for raising taxes on those despised “rich”. Obama talks about the “rich” as though they hit the jackpot in Las Vegas or something. He says things like “those who are most fortunate in our society”, and other such polemics. He seems to feel that the “rich” are somehow bad people, that they got where they are by nefarious means, that their money is tainted. He apparently has no concept of that great American phenomenon of upward mobility. He seemingly cannot relate to people who start with little, work hard their whole life, manage to get a little bit ahead, and then enjoying the fruits of their labor. Obama regards them as fair game.

But as you see Obama up there demonizing the “rich”, and saying they can easily afford to pay “a little more”, just remember that it only a matter of time until whatever he does to the rich will also apply to you. The “rich” in his world are anyone who actually has a job and pays taxes, rather than being on the government dole. Today, Obama says the “rich” is anyone making more than $250,000; before long it’ll be anyone making over $$200,000, or $150,00, or $100,000. The cut-off point is completely arbitrary.

The cold hard facts are that the rich already pay the bulk of federal income taxes, which Obama doesn’t want you to know, because then he couldn’t demonize them as a diversionary tactic.

IRS data from 2008 (the last year data is available) show that the top 1% of income earners paid 38% of all federal income taxes. Yes, 1% of the people are paying 38% of the total federal income tax. In that same year, the top 10% of income earners paid 69%, and the top 50% paid 97% of the total federal income tax burden. The bottom 50% of earners paid only 3%.
The reality is that the “rich” can’t be taxed enough to solve the federal budget deficit problem. If the government took all of the taxable income of the top 1% of earners, it would generate $938 billion, which wouldn’t pay the current year’s $1.65 trillion deficit out of a $4 trillion budget, much less the total $14 trillion federal debt.

For Obama to stand there and say we can solve this problem if only the “rich” would pay “a little” more is completely dishonest, as the facts show. It tells you that he really has something else in mind.

And what might that something else be? The only way to solve the federal government debt and deficit problem via taxes is by drastically raising taxes on the middle class. This talk about soaking the rich is to make the middle class think they won’t be paying higher taxes, while Obama is covertly scheming to do just that via a European-style value added tax (VAT) which would hit everyone, or cap and tax which would hit everyone, or something else.

The real problem with the federal budget deficit, though, is not that taxes are too low on some people, it’s that the government spends too much. How long would any off us as individuals or companies last financially if we consistently, month in - month out, year in - year out, spent more than we had? A very basic principle of sound financial management is to stay within your means spend only as much as you have. But the federal government seems totally incapable of doing this, or even understanding the concept.

The U.S. Treasury Secretary recently said that we can’t solve the government debt problem by cutting spending. Oh, so I guess we solve the debt problem by continuing to spend money like a drunken sailor, in his mind.

Another dose of reality is that the federal budget deficit and debt problem can be addresses only by restructuring Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, because that’s where the bulk of the money goes.

It would be immensely helpful if the President of the United States would have an honest, frank, adult discussion with the American people on all of this rather than the demagoguery, deception, double-talk, and posturing that we have gotten from him so far.

ObamaCare and Cynthia

2011-04-10T13:39:00.000-07:00

We recently marked the first anniversary of the greatest single assault on individual liberty in my lifetime, and maybe since the founding of the country: ObamaCare. As we continue to debate what the real effects of that law will be, I think back to an episode that occurred almost twenty years ago and which has special meaning to me.

Twenty years ago a fragile, extremely premature baby girl was born. That person is now a normal, healthy, bright, energetic young woman in college studying creative writing and journalism, getting ready to go out into the adult world on her own.

At the time of her birth, it was not at all a given that she would make it this far. You see, Cynthia was born at twenty-four weeks gestation, and weighed in at one pound eleven and a half ounces. The birth was life threatening to mother and child. After she (and her mother) survived the birth, it was unclear whether Cynthia’s life span would be measured in hours, days, months, or years. She was right at the edge of what was considered to be somewhat viable for prematurity at the time.

The doctors in the Stanford Children’s Hospital neo-natal intensive care unit told her parents that her chances of long term survival were somewhere around twenty-five percent, but that even if she made it for the long term she would most likely have some serious problems of one sort or another with brain development, eyes, heart, lungs, digestive system, or just about anything.

Cynthia spent the first five months of her life in the hospital. That’s not five days or five weeks, but five months. She had highly specialized medical care around the clock. There were many ups and downs. The doctors more than once signaled to Cynthia’s parents that she might not live through the next twenty-four hours.

But a miracle started unfolding. Every day that Cynthia lived without a serious incident improved her chances of a more positive outcome. And gradually, ever so slowly, she started getting better. Some of the major health threats began to fade. Brain bleeding did not occur; instead, her brain slowly developed normally. Her heart grew and functioned properly. Her digestive system improved. Her eyes progressed and it started to look as though she would not be blind; that she might even see normally.

One significant milestone was when she got off of the respirator and started breathing on her own. Then she was able to be taken out of the incubator and be held by her mother. She started being fed orally instead of intravenously. She followed an object with her eyes. Then she actually cried out loud, a major developmental achievement.

Another major milestone was when she got out of the neo-natal intensive care unit and went to the regular neo-natal unit.

And on one glorious day, little baby Cynthia, at the tender young age of five months, was well enough to go home for the first time. By this time, she had fattened up to a whopping four and a half pounds.

Although the major dangers were behind her, Cynthia was still not completely out of the woods. She had an oxygen tube under her nose and a tank at home and one that was portable. She used this for several more months, but her lungs continued to develop and she got off of the oxygen.

Cynthia continued to grow, but faced more health challenges. She showed a profound lack of speech development, but responded to speech therapy. At toddler age, she started walking on her knees, but couldn’t stand up due to some ankle problems. She had progressive casts put on both legs; these are casts that bend the foot upward thus stretching the tendons in the ankle. The “progressive” part is that the casts were taken off every couple off weeks and new ones were put on that bent the foot and stretched the tendons even more. The she moved to progressive braces that work in the much the same way except that instead of being replaced, they were tightened up periodically by her parents. Finally, she walked normally.

As she went through school, there were learning issues. Specialized tutors and other programs addressed these, and Cynthia did well in school. In some areas, she excelled, particularly languages.

Cynthia played Little League Baseball and then softball, all the way through high school. She played some basketball. She learned to swim.

Now, Cynthia is a sophomore in college studying creative writing and journalism.

And as you have probably figured out, this story is dear to me because Cynthia is my daughter.

I am a religious person, and I still think about what role God played in all of this. I am sure there was a role, but I don’t claim to know what and why. I’ll find out someday.

But one thing I am sure of is that the miracle of Cynthia came about here on Earth because she had access to the best, most advanced medical care in the world. Her years of treatment were paid for because her father had a medical insurance plan available to every employee where he worked, from the president of the company on down. The various specialists that saved her were there not because of some government bureaucrat or some government mandate or some government run health care system, but because of a free market health care system that is the envy of the world.

A few days after Cynthia was born, I thought I had better find out what this was all going to cost. I called the hospital billing department and asked. They said her treatment would cost an average of $5000 per day. The doctors had told us that Cynthia would be in the hospital for a minimum of 90 days. Do the math. The first three days of her life cost $27,000. The final bill, years later, was over $800,000, plus what we had spent on our own for tutors and such.

And through it all, I was never asked by anyone, anywhere, how I was going to pay all of those bills. Not once. Cost or how the bills were going to be paid was never a consideration of the doctors or hospital in deciding what treatment Cynthia would receive.

I do not want to think what this ordeal would have been like if some nameless, faceless government bureaucrats in a far off city were making decisions about how much my daughter’s life and well being were worth given how many other people the government had to take care of with a limited budget.

Yes, Cynthia’s story is a medical miracle. But America has always been a place of medical miracles. Since 1970, American doctors have won more Nobel Prizes for Medicine than all other countries combined. According to McKinsey and Co., thousands of foreigners come to the United States every year for medical treatment they cannot get at home – due to rationing or simply because it is just not available.

Consider cancer, as just one example. Compared to the U.S., breast cancer mortality is 9% higher in Canada (according to the government statistics of each country), 52% higher in Germany and 88% higher in the United Kingdom (according to studies published in Lancet Oncology). Prostate cancer mortality is 604% higher in Britain.

Other studies show that patients who need knee and hip replacement, cataract surgery, and radiation treatment wait months longer in the United Kingdom and Canada than in the United States.

The facts and history are irrefutable. The American health care system is far better at fostering innovation and responding to patient needs. On the other hand, the history of government run health care systems is there for all to see. Are we going to learn from that history or are we doomed to repeat it?

Learning From Events In Japan

2011-03-31T07:38:00.000-07:00

I have a Master’s degree in electrical engineering, and I worked in the electric power industry for over ten years.

The amount of misinformation and outright wrong information that has appeared daily in the various media since the earthquake and tidal wave hit the nuclear power plants in Japan is startling. These people really ought to either keep quiet or get it right. To cite just a few examples, I heard a TV newscaster say that the control rods in the reactor were spinning (they don’t); another one was standing in front of a display board waving his arms around saying the heat from the reactor is applied to the turbine (it isn’t); one of them said a nuclear cloud was heading toward Tokyo (it wasn’t); one reporter who is apparently a kook said, right there on the radio, that millions and millions of people in Japan will die of leukemia and thyroid cancer (they won’t); then it was reported that radiation has been detected on the West Coast of the U.S. (a billion times lower than any danger level, we later learned), etc. etc. etc. All of this, and more, was right there on major networks and in major newspapers. How do these people have any remaining credibility?

Let’s review the technical basics of generating electricity and how electric power plants work. When we get through this information, you will know more about this subject than most of the talking heads on TV.

Electricity is generated in two ways: 1) When a conductor (a wire) passes through a magnetic field, and 2) by means of a chemical reaction, i.e., batteries. We will discuss the first method, since it is the one used in electric power plants.

I am excluding static electricity from this discussion, since only small amounts can be produced in that form.

To generate electricity by moving a conductor through a magnetic field, we need first to create the magnetic field. This is easily done with magnets. You probably did the little experiment in science class where you put a piece of paper over a magnet, sprinkled iron filings on the paper, and observed the interesting lines that the filings aligned themselves in. That was the effect of the magnetic field emanating from the magnet.

OK, so now we know where to get the magnetic field. Next we need to get some conductors, or wires, moving through it. This is most readily done by wrapping the wires around a rod (a “rotor”), and then causing the rotor to spin in close proximity to the magnets. When this happens, electricity will be generated in the wires that are wound around the spinning rotor. This is how a “generator” works.

We will also connect some other wires (transmission and distribution lines) to the generator to get the electricity to wherever we want it.

We won’t go into transformers.

OK, so somehow we must get the rotor of the generator to spin. We could do this by connecting a diesel (or gasoline) engine to it, and this is sometimes done in special situations. In most large scale electric power plants, though, we connect a steam turbine to the generator to get the rotor to spin. A water turbine could also be used (as at the Claytor Lake dam).

A steam turbine is another device that spins on an axis. A steam turbine contains a series of specially designed blades. Steam is admitted into the turbine and causes it to spin by pushing on the blades. It’s a type of steam engine.

Finally, we have to create steam, and a lot of it. We have to boil water on a large scale. That means we need a heat source that can produce a lot of heat

A large amount of heat is most readily created by burning something. In steam power plants, coal, oil, or natural gas can be used. Over 50% of the electricity in the U.S. is created in coal fired power plants, for example.

Another way to create a lot of heat is through a controlled nuclear reaction. This is what happens in a nuclear power plant. A nuclear reaction creates heat to boil the water to create steam to spin the turbine and generator rotor, thus producing electricity.

Control rods are in the nuclear reactor. They are made out of a special metal and are used to regulate the intensity of the nuclear reaction. This is done by moving them up and down into or out of the reactor core.

The nuclear reactor must also be cooled, since even at its lowest setting, it will create so much heat that it will literally melt itself (a meltdown). The cooling is done with water pumped through the reactor core. If that water flow stops, the reactor will over heat, much like your car engine if the water pump fails.

The cooling water pumps in a nuclear power plant are powered by the electricity network in the plant. There is also a back-up diesel engine and generator to provide electricity to the pumps if the primary power supply fails. Finally, there are usually batteries that can keep the pumps running for a few hours if the diesel generator also fails.

When the tidal wave hit the nuclear power plants in Japan, the primary electrical supply was wiped out, as were the diesel powered generators and the batteries. The crisis at the nuclear power plants was caused by the tidal wave, not the earthquake.

The big problem with nuclear reactors is not the reactor, but the spent nuclear fuel. This material is highly radioactive, and will remain so for thousands of years. Disposing of it is a problem. Generally it is put into lead containers and then stored deep in a mountain in a remote area.

Now that we are armed with this knowledge, amid all of the media hysteria and hype, we can remain cool, calm, and collected. And we can notice some very pertinent questions that the media isn’t informed enough to ask.

1. Why were these nuclear reactors located on the coast in an earthquake prone area?
2. Given that they were on the coast, why did the plant designers not think of a tidal wave when doing their safety analysis?
3. Why were all six of the reactors in the same physical location where they were all susceptible to one natural disaster in that local area? Why weren’t they built in dispersed locations?
4. Why was the spent nuclear fuel stored at the reactor site instead of somewhere else, again to avoid a “single point of failure” problem?

These are the types of lessons we need to learn from the events in Japan as we move forward with nuclear power plants here in the U.S.

Obama Would Rather Be President Of China.

2011-03-26T12:02:00.000-07:00

From the current issue of "National Review":

"Is lassitude coming in with Barack Obama's gray hairs? Apropos of the Arab revolt, a friendly story in the New York Times reported that Obama 'has told people that it wold be so much easier to be the president of China.' Not so that he could wield, as per Thomas Friedman, dictatorial powers, but so that he might get less attention. 'No one is scrutinizing Hu Jintao's words in Tahrir Square,' an unnamed official explained. Obama picked the wrong job then, didn't he? Ambition, vanity, and a string of unearned successes may have persuaded Mr. Legislator-Who-Votes-Present to think that he could step up to the most demanding executive position on earth. What explains the troop of flacks, including Obamacons, who praised this man's character as they whooped him into office?"

Incoherence From Obama

2011-03-22T12:42:00.000-07:00

In explaining the U.S. action in Libya, Obama said recently that Qaddafi must go, but that's not the mission of the Coalition forces now in action in Libya.

A few days ago, Obama was defending himself from being responsible for rising gas prices. He said that his policies have not cased gas prices to go up, but rather that his policies have actually resulted in the highest domestic oil production in seven years. His main energy policy has been to ban new offshore drilling and exploration. So he is telling us that banning off shore oil drilling has caused domestic oil production to go up.

Maybe Gov. McDonnell Can Help In Washington

2011-03-16T12:12:00.000-07:00

Congress just passed another "continuing resolution", kicking the can of writing a federal budget down the road another three weeks.

Meanwhile, here in Virginia, we are doing just fine, thank you, thanks to Republican Governor Bob McDonnell and the Republicans in the state legislature.

In January of 2010, Bob McDonnell was sworn in as Governor of Virginia.He inherited a multi-billion dollar budget shortfall from his predecessor Democrat Governor Tim Kaine. One of the first things McDonnell did was announce that he would veto any budget sent to him that included any new taxes. With Republicans having an override-proof number of seats in the state legislature, that option was "off the table", as they say. The legislature then got to work and had an adult conversation on how to cut spending in order to balance the state budget. A balanced budget is required by the Virginia Constitution. The cuts were made, and yes, some wee painful, but the legislature did its job by producing a balanced budget with no new taxes.

It all took only six months.

Today our economy in Virginia is rebounding, unemployment is heading down, we remain fiscally solvent, and VIrginians are not saddled with higher taxes.

Because Virginia is governed in a fiscally responsible way and keeps taxes low, companies want to come here. NorthropGrumman, for example, relocated its corporate headquarters from Los Angeles to Richmond a few months ago and brought about 300 new jobs to the state in the process. On a smaller scale, in my own community, VIrginia Casting Industries relocated here from out of state and brought 20 jobs.

Maybe we should send Gov. McDonnell to Washington to help them with their budget problem that they don't seem to be able to solve.

Roanoke Times Is Uninformed - Again

2011-03-13T17:26:00.000-07:00

In the editorial “Guilt by association” on Mar. 10, the Roanoke Times rails against the homegrown terror hearings held in Congress recently, calling them “shameful”. What’s truly shameful is the abject ignorance of the RT editorial staff on this issue.

The editorial states that “With no evidence to back him up and no law enforcement witnesses to testify to his central complaint, King is engaging in demonizing an entire community.” This statement is factually false.

Since 9/11, there have been more than 50 known cases, involving about 130 individuals, in which terrorists plots were hatched on American soil. These include plots to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, an office tower in Dallas, a federal court house in Illinois, the Washington DC metro, and the Trans-Alaska pipeline. All but two of the plotters were Muslim, and those two sought to offer their services to al Qaeda.

The witnesses called by Representative Peter King’s committee on Homeland Security included L.A. County Sheriff Leroy Baca.

There was a time when journalists who, out of ignorance, printed such an accusatory but completely false statement would be fired. Not at today’s Roanoke Times.

National Debt Ceiling

2011-03-11T09:32:00.000-08:00

Congress is now engaged in a great debate over whether or not to increase the ceiling for the national debt. That ceiling is currently set at $14 trillion, and federal government spending will soon push the national debt up to the limit. Congress can either increase the ceiling or have the horror of a government shutdown.

But wait, there is one other option: Congress could cut federal spending such that the debt ceiling isn't reached.

Here's my question. What is the point of having a "ceiling" on the national debt if the response every time the ceiling is hit is to raise the ceiling?

Latest reality on the effects of Obamacare

2011-03-10T14:34:00.000-08:00

Click on the image to see a larger version.

Thus far, the Secretary of Health and Human Services has granted over a thousand waivers to compliance with Obamacare, most involving the so-called "mini-med plans". Over a thousand. No doubt, many more such waivers will be granted.

If Obamacare is so beneficial, as we were told, why do so many waivers have to be granted?

Federal budget is out of control - more eveidence

2011-03-07T14:16:00.000-08:00

The federal budget deficit for 2007 was $161 billion. The federal budget deficit for last month was $223 billion.

More Of The New Civility From Democrats

2011-03-05T08:36:00.001-08:00

Democrats in Wisconsin displaying the new civility in public discourse we heard was so needed after the Arizona tragedy.

News From General Motors

2011-03-03T09:35:00.000-08:00

In the financial news recently, we have learned that GM's sales were up dramatically last quarter. This is being trumpeted as evidence that the new GM is heading in the right direction after the government takeover. GM is now "green", building environmentally correct cars, and creating thousands of "green" jobs now and into the future. It's all wonderful!!

There's only one problem with this story line: It's completely false. As you read further into the news about GM's latest results, you learn the truth, buried down there in the story. You see, those latest good results from GM were due to strong sales of Cadillacs and gas-guzzling Silverado trucks!!! Not the Chevy Volt!!

I predict that GM will go bankrupt again. The environmental extremists and government bureaucrats now running the company don't deal in reality. They will continue driving the company off of a cliff by forcing it to build little tinny "green" cars that are very expensive which no one will buy. Once the Cadillacs, Silverados, and their ilk are discontinued or emasculated, which will surely happen because the greenies in charge will insist on it, the company is toast.

Sell your stock.

No Government Shutdown - Darn!

2011-03-02T11:32:00.000-08:00

Yesterday the House passed a a stop-gap measure to keep the federal government going for two more weeks, and today the Senate agreed. Would anybody notice if all of the bureaucrats in Washington were off the job? Can't we just shut the whole thing down for good, and start over?

Well, no, that's not realistic. But we can cut the bloated bureaucracy down to size. I don't mean "trim", I mean take a meat cleaver to it.

Sen. Rand Paul from Kentucky has proposed cutting the budget by $500 billion - not over ten years, but immediately. Included in his proposed cuts are foreign aid, farm subsidies, Amtrak subsidies, shrinking the FCC, selling unused federal assets, and others.
Sounds like a good start.

Black History Month

2011-02-26T14:02:00.000-08:00

If you want to learn some Black history that you won't see or hear anywhere else, go here: http://www.nbra.info/index.cfm?fuseaction=home.main&

Bloated Government In Washington Gets Even Bigger

2011-02-24T11:47:00.000-08:00

Unemployment is stuck at 9 to 10%, and real unemployment (including those who have given up on finding a job) is more like 18%. Meanwhile, 200,000 bureaucrats have been added to the Federal Government in the last two years since Obama took office. Yes, not only have there been no cuts in the size of the Federal government during the financial crisis with the government running trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see, but 200,000 bureaucrats have been added!

Now Obama has taken to talking about how we must all live within our means. He wasn't concerned about Washington living within its means while running up a $14 trillion national debt, but now suddenly he is so concerned.

Let me translate. When Obama says "we" must live within our means, he means "you". He has no intention whatsoever of cutting the bloated Federal bureaucracy. What he is really saying is that you need to cut your family budget and corporate payroll (i.e., jobs) even more and send additional money to Washington to save the bureaucrats' jobs.

Astonishing Weakness From The Obama Administration

2011-02-22T14:12:00.000-08:00

First there was Egypt, where Obama supported Mubarak, the didn't, then did, then didn't. Then Tunisia, and Obama said nothing. Next Bahrain, when he said, well, something memorable. Now we have Libya.

Gadhafi has been the thuggish dictator of Libya for decades. Now the Libyan people, inspired by the other freedom efforts in North Africa and elsewhere in the region, are demonstrating and calling for more rights. Gadhafi has had his security forces shooting unarmed civilians in the streets, hundreds have been killed, and he actually ordered two of his air force jets to bomb the protesters (the pilots, to their credit, refused and defected to Malta).

And what does the leader of the most powerful nation in the world have to say about the actions of this murderous thug in Libya? Why, Obama called on this dictator who is killing people in the streets to respect those people's rights. And Obama's Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, warned that we are watching events in Libya.

The guy ordered his air force to bomb the protesters, people are being gunned down in the streets, and Obama tells him that he really ought to respect his people's rights, and then sternly says that we are watching?!!!

This is pathetic weakness on the part of Obama. It would be comical if it weren't so dangerous to the U.S. Thugs and dictators, such as those in Iran and North Korea who are trying to build nuclear weapons, see weakness as an opportunity.

More Uncivilized Behavior From The Left Wing Liberals

2011-02-17T08:05:00.000-08:00

Do you remember the left wing liberals preaching about how we need to initiate a new era of civility in political discourse a short while ago? I guess liberal groups weren’t listening.

The libertarian-leaning Koch brothers (Charles and David) are industrialists. They host an annual weekend seminar, or retreat, that is attended by a couple of hundred leading conservatives and that has big name conservative guest speakers. This year at the event, about a thousand liberal activists protested, waving banners and signs with slogans such as “Quarantine the Kochs” and “Koch kills”. Greenpeace hired a blimp with pictures of the Kochs and the words “Dirty Kochs”. The Center for American Progress mobilized. Common Cause held a panel. These are all left-wing liberal groups. The thing that had them so lathered was a group of conservatives who had the temerity to get together and talk.

The bald hypocicy of left wing liberals as illustrated by these bulling tactics of some of their premier groups is stunning. But you can’t blame all liberals for the actions of a few, you say. After recently barking about Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, talk radio, Fox News, etc., etc., etc., have you heard just one prominent liberal condemn these uncivil, threatening actions by well-known liberal groups? Not -- a --- word.

Ghandi said that the way to fight injustice is to bring it out in the open for all to see. We are seeing over and over the intolerance and pure hatred of the left for conservatives. The outrageous actions of these left-wing groups at the Koch event and the silence of most other liberals afterwards leaves no doubt about their true nature.

How The Media Reports The News According To An Agenda - #1

2011-02-13T10:05:00.000-08:00

Headlines In A Recent USA Today (Jan. 14, 2011): “Pregnant women rife with chemicals.”

As soon you read these headlines, you know that a fraud is being perpetrated. The statement is so outlandish and so sensational that you just know there’s a skunk in the woodpile somewhere.

When you take even a cursory look at the body of the article and a data table therein, it becomes even more definite that a fraud is being perpetrated. Here is the table:
“Pregnant women’s bodies are likely contaminated with dozens of toxic chemicals, a new study finds. Percentage of the pregnant women studied having detectable levels of the following chemicals:”
Perchlorate (ingredient in rocket fuel) -------------------------- 100%
BPA (used in plastics) ----------------------------------------------- 96%
Lead ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 94%
Mercury ----------------------------------------------------------------- 89%
Cadmium (toxic heavy metal) -------------------------------------- 66%
DDT (banned pesticide) --------------------------------------------- 62%

What?!!! All pregnant women have rocket fuel in their bodies?? How is this happening? After you become pregnant, does the doctor prescribe rocket fuel?

Ninety-six percent have BPA (plastics) in their bodies? Are plastic bags that much of a threat?

Ninety-four percent have lead. I know there’s a danger that the kiddies will eat old lead paint off of the windowsill, but pregnant women?

Mercury. Cadmium. DDT. What is going on here? After a woman becomes pregnant, does her body suddenly become a sponge for all of these chemicals? What’s a woman supposed to do, become a bubble-woman for nine months?

If you read the entire newspaper article, which most people don’t , you find the complete truth and the source of the deception, buried near the end of the article.

The newspaper article never actually tells us who performed this “new study”, but we are told that the results were published in Environmental Health Perspectives. Going on-line, I found the publication and the study results. The authors work for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and at the University of California – San Francisco in the Program on Reproductive Health. So it’s the usual suspects: the EPA and people in San Francisco.

I also found this very interesting quote from the abstract of the study results: “Conclusions: Pregnant women in the U.S. are exposed to multiple chemicals. Further efforts are warranted to understand sources of exposure and implications for policy-making.” The abstract also states that the level of chemicals found in pregnant women is the same as or lower that for all women.

The newspaper article also quotes a person from the National Resources Defense Council, an environmental extremist group, saying how “disturbing” these findings are, and saying that the situation may be “even worse”.

And then comes the whole point of this manufactured scare piece. The newspaper article says that the findings should be a “call to action” to overhaul the main law that regulates chemicals.

Only near the end of the newspaper article does the writer come clean and admit that it’s a ruse, in order to avoid being outright dishonest, I suppose. Here at the end of the newspaper article it is stated that real experts in the field (American Chemistry Council), as contrasted with environmental activists groups, say that as part of every person’s daily life, as we breath air and drink water, minute traces of chemicals occurring naturally in the environment will come into our bodies, and that modern chemical testing techniques can detect exceeding small traces of such substances, traces that are far below any danger level. And we also learn, near the end of the article, that even the Center for Disease Control (CDC), says these findings are of no concern.

Nowhere in the newspaper article are we told that the study’s authors themselves said that more effort is needed before conclusions can be drawn regarding implications for environmental policies.

But yet, in spite of the disclaimers by the study’s authors and opinions from legitimate, non-biased experts that the study results are of no significance, we have the blaring headlines about those pathetic pregnant women’s bodies being so horribly contaminated with chemicals, and a call for action to fix this terrible problem via even stricter laws and regulations.

This article has given us a lesson in the methodology of the media as they report the “news” according to an agenda. First, they find some sensationalized, manufactured data or opinions from biased advocacy groups that are pushing an agenda. Next, they present this as legitimate news, complete with alarming headlines, and use it as a “call to action” for even more draconian governmental restrictions and regulations. Then at the end of the article, beyond the point where most people have stopped reading, they cite legitimate, objective experts that counteract everything said previously in the article about the disturbing findings and the need for a call to action.

The Intolerance of the Left Overcomes Another Moderate

2011-02-10T10:34:00.000-08:00

Virginia Senator Jim Webb announced yesterday that he will not seek re-election in 2012, after serving only one term. I'm sure this is due to my two blog postings on him. No, I can't take credit for this; the credit goes to the Democrat Party.

Senator Webb was a moderate who antagonized the left wing liberals who control the Democrat Party. He graduated from the Naval Academy and was a Marine in Vietnam. He served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs and as Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan Administration. As a Senator, he was a strong supporter of the military and veterans, a strong supporter of the Second Amendment, and critical of what he called "overly permissive immigration policies." Webb once famously remarked, while he was a Senator, that a rich minority kid from Northern Virginia should not be given preference in college admission over a poor white kid from Southwest Virginia, a position which enraged the Liberals but for which I was tempted to vote for him, regardless of his other positions.

As you can see, Webb was a moderate, but there is no place for moderates in the Democrat Party of today, so he is on his way out.

Yes, moderates do have a hard time of it in the Democrat Party. Just ask Joe Lieberman, who was in effect drummed out of the Democrat Party for supporting the war in Iraq while President Bush was in office. Other than his support for the Iraq war, he was almost entirely an orthodox liberal. But for this one transgression, he was challenged in the Democrat primary and lost. He became an Independent and won re-election anyway. He caucused with the Democrats, but even so they were thereafter cold to him. He has also announced he will not seek re-election.

Prior to the election last November, there were 54 so-called "blue dog" Democrats in the House of Representatives; now there are 26. Blue dogs are Democrats who are more conservative than most Democrats. Blue Dogs have an agenda which protects the interests of the vulnerable while also respecting traditional cultural values and keeping taxes low. The are called "blue dogs" because someone once said that the extreme liberals in the Democrat Party were choking them blue. The remaining blue dogs are ostracized within the Democrat Party, and Nancy Pelosi would no doubt git rid of them if she could.

My parents never voted for anyone other than a Democrat in their entire lives. But the Democrat Party of their day was nothing like the Democrat Party of today. In today's Democrat Party, if you don't tow the extreme left wing line of Obama/Reid/Pelosi, you are personna non grata. You might be allowed to hang around with the Democrats if you want, but you will not be accepted or welcomed, and certainly not embraced.You may even be targeted for defeat in the next election if the extreme liberal Democrat leadership thinks they can get you out and replaced by a more rigidly liberal ideologue.

More Deception About Health Care

2011-02-09T09:41:00.001-08:00

After the Senate vote to repeal Obamacare, California Senator Barbara Boxer said, “We should not go back to the days where 62 percent of all bankruptcies were linked to a health care crisis and 45,000 people a year died because they could not get access to health insurance.”

These statistics are pure fabrications; they’re just made up.

No one in this country has died due to lack of access to health insurance, because no one is denied health care. Emergency rooms are required by law to treat everyone; no one is turned away. There are also free clinics that will see anyone, and other resources. No one who needs healthcare is denied treatment when then seek it. But here Ms. Boxer is trying to make you think that masses of people were dying in the street, like the black plague, until the government took over health care. Others pushing Obamacare used the same deception. It’s just a complete lie.

And those bankruptcies, well, it’s another one that’s just made up. Sixty-two percent of all bankruptcies cause by a lack of health insurance? Oh, no, it’s due to a “health care crisis”, whatever that is. If it’s referring to a situation where someone gets serious ill, is laid up for an extended period, can’t work or something, and as a result gets into some financial problems, the issue of health insurance is irrelevant. Government run health insurance will not affect those cases in any way, so it’s a blatant deception to claim that “health crises” are a justification for the government take-over of healthcare.

This is what is so telling about many of those pushing Obamacare. They can’t make their case honestly and with legitimate, logical, clear data, so they just deceive and make stuff up, all the while trying to whip up hysteria and fear. Thousands of people dying in the streets, no health insurance, children, bankruptcies, the sky is falling, the sky is falling, the sky is falling, blah, blah, blah.

Enough is enough. These people need to go.

Timeless Wisdom From Ronald Reagan - In Honor Of His 100th. Birthday

2011-02-07T08:56:00.000-08:00

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States of America where men were free."

Ronald Reagan

Virginia Senators Warner and Webb Thumb Their Noses At The People - Again

2011-02-05T13:14:00.000-08:00

Virginia Senator Webb voted against the repeal of Obamacare yesterday (Feb. 2), and Virginia Senator Mark Warner skipped the vote altogether. The vote count was 47 for repeal and 51 against repeal. If Misters Webb and Warner had followed the will of the people and voted for repeal, the bill would be on the President’s desk. Yes, he would veto it, but wouldn’t that be a grand spectacle.

Warner and Webb have once again thumbed their nose at the people. Every poll that has ever been done on Obamacare has shown that most people did not want it passed in the first place, and most now want it repealed. But Warner and Webb don’t care what we the people want; they care about forcing their extreme left wing agenda on us no matter how we feel about it. They think they know better than we do what is good for us. They think they are our rulers, not our representatives.

We have an opportunity to explain some things to Warner and Webb in 2012 (Webb) and 2014 (Warner). George Allen has announced that he will seek the nomination to run against Webb, and another good candidate will no doubt emerge to take on Warner. You know what to do.

In the meantime, you can call their offices and let them know how you feel:
Senator Mark Warner: 540-857-2676
Senator Jim Webb: 540-772-4236
Yes, it is worth while to give them feedback even though the vote has already happened. They need to hear form you; there is always a next time.

Punxsutawney Phil: There will be an early Spring this year

2011-02-02T15:55:00.000-08:00

Punxsutawney Phil, the world's official groundhog, lives in a burrow on top of Gobbler's Knob just outside of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. Every February 2nd. he comes out of his hole early in the morning and looks around. If he sees his shadow, he is startled, which makes him run back into his hole, meaning there will be six more weeks of winter weather. If he does not see his shadow, he stays out poking around for awhile, meaning there will be an early spring.

Today, as they do every year, members of the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club Inner Circle donned tuxedos and silk top hats, then marched up to the top of Gobbler's knob to receive the official prognostication from Phil. At exactly 7:20 a.m. EST, the club president spoke to Phil in Groundhogese and was told that he (Phil) had not seen his shadow and therefore Spring was on the way soon.

North Dakota Leads The Way

2011-02-01T09:21:00.000-08:00

I am on the Empire Builder train from Chicago to Seattle, through North Dakota and Montana. It’s the only way to travel. We have our own private room, toilet and shower facilities, great food from a menu served in the dining car at a table with a table cloth, wine tasting in the afternoon, an observation car, a lounge car, and – as they say – much more.

I didn’t know there was still so much open space in this country. Going through North Dakota and Montana, I saw vast expanses of snow-covered flat land. There is nothing but snow and a very occasional farm house for as far as the eye could see. And one could see a very long distance since the land is flat and there are almost no trees (due to the harsh climate, I guess). You could even see the curvature of the earth by looking off to the horizon from left to right. And we just kept rolling along in comfort. I wonder how the pioneers made it ---- ?

On the way, I read in a local North Dakota newspaper , the Minot Daily News, that North Dakota is now the third largest oil producer in the U.S., after Alaska and Texas. I didn’t know that, did you? Third largest oil producing state. As a result, North Dakota has a recession-proof economy. All through the economic crisis over the last three or four years, unemployment in ND never got above 4.4 %. Meanwhile, unemployment elsewhere in the country peaked at 10% and still is stubbornly high at 9.4%.

Thank you environmentalists.

Development of oil resources is demonized and fought vigorously by that crew. Obama even used the Gulf oil spill (which is completely cleaned up already) as an excuse to put a moratorium on new off-shore oil drilling at a cost of tens of thousands of jobs. Yes, he has now lifted it, but he is still blocking new oil development by means of over-regulation. No new federal permits for off shore exploration or drilling are being issued; ANWAR remains locked; don’t even mention oil shale.

Development of these resources, which can be done in an environmentally responsible way, would create hundreds of thousands of high paying jobs thereby helping hard-working American families and the economy; it would increase tax revenues thus boosting state and federal government budgets dramatically; the trade balance and national security would be improved by reducing our dependence on foreign oil; and this is just for starters. Ask North Dakota.

I guess there in North Dakota the authorities put the well being of the economy and the state budget and people above appeasement of sanctimonious environmental extremists.

Economists Say Higher Energy Prices WIll Hurt The Economy

2011-01-30T10:45:00.000-08:00

In a USA Today article (1/24/11) on the brightening economy, there is this statement: “And 71% of the economists said they’re concerned that higher energy prices will slow growth.”

Seventy-one percent of economists think higher energy prices will hurt the economy. And yet the Obama administration and other liberal Democrats are trying to push energy prices up dramatically via cap and trade, all the while talking about how they want to help the economy and create jobs.

This is the incoherence of the left on full display.

Obama Discovers Turbines But Doesn't Realize What Makes Them Spin

2011-01-28T14:44:00.000-08:00

President Obama recently went to Schenectady, NY to a General Electric factory to talk about how he wants to create jobs. So there he was pointing to a huge turbine and saying how GE was selling a bunch of them, and he wanted to see more of that to keep the 1200 workers busy, and maybe even enabler GE to hire some more.

There’s only one problem with Mr. Obama’s new found infatuation with turbines. Other policies of his will destroy the turbine business.

The turbines he was standing in front of at the GE plant were steam turbines that will be used to turn an electric generator. Steam turbines are powered by - - steam. That steam comes from a boiler that burns something to heat the water. In the case of electric generators, fifty percent of the time the steam boiler burns coal; the other fifty percent use oil and natural gas. Mr. Obama is a known environmental extremist, and has stated that he wants to bankrupt the coal industry as well as block any future coal fired power plants. Oil and natural gas are also on his hit list. So if those Obama policies succeed, there will be no steam turbine market and all of those 1200 workers at the GE turbine plant in Schenectady will be out of a job!

This is stunning incoherence from a President of the United States. On the one hand he makes no bones about wanting to bankrupt or other wise eliminate the coal industry and coal fired power plants because he thinks they hurt the environment, and on the other hand he extols the benefits of a factory building the steam turbines used in those coal fired power plants as a good thing because they create jobs!!

Is Obama, billed by his supporters as the smartest man on planet Earth, so clueless that he really can’t see the inter-relationship between coal and steam turbines and jobs for workers making those turbines, or does he think he can talk out of both sides of his mouth and we won’t be able to figure it out? You decide.

Is This The U.S. Congress Or Romper Room

2011-01-26T11:27:00.000-08:00

You will go a long way toward understanding why the country is in the dismal conditions it is when you contemplate the latest news coming out of Washington: Congressmen are all in a dither about who they will sit beside during the President’s State of the Union Address.

Yes, the big news surrounding the State of the Union address is not so much what the President will or will not say; the news is about the various “play dates” Senators and Representatives are setting up with each other.

Yes, this is all big news. The New York Times ran a long article on it, calling it a “Congressional Mixer”. The sub-headlines were, “Asking lawmakers to arrange their seating to promote mingling.” “It has made for some pressure, perhaps even some sweaty palms, in finding an available partner.”

“Mary from Louisiana asked Olympia from Maine because they are both BFF’s. Kirsten from New York went the Sadie Hawkins route and asked John from South Dakota, and thus the deal between two members of the Senate with seriously good hair was sealed.” And more about Senator Schumer planning to sit with Senator Coburn, and others.

Really. This is what our national lawmakers are devoting their time and energy to in these trying times? They’re busy lining up play dates? Is this the U.S. Congress or playtime in kindergarten? Maybe instead of calling it the Capitol, we should rename it Romper Room.

This is childish beyond belief, and a national embarrassment.

Through The Looking Glass

2011-01-22T11:29:00.000-08:00

Watching the events following the tragedy in Arizona has caused me to think that I must have stepped through the looking glass with Lewis Carroll. The world appears to be normal, until parts of it that you don’t usually see come into view, and then you observe all sorts of bizarre and surreal things.

Within a couple of hours of the shootings, there were major public and political figures blaming it on Sarah Palin, who was in Alaska minding her own business at the time. The New York Times said it was the fault of the tea partiers. Others said it was Rush Limbaugh, talk radio in general, Fox News. Yes, it was the “harsh” political rhetoric that unhinged the shooter and made him do it. They would have you believe that normal, everyday people hear something on the radio or TV and then go get their gun and start shooting.

Next we saw the chief law enforcement officer (the sheriff) in the county where the crime occurred turn into a political demagogue and blame the shooting on everyone in the country except the guy who pulled the trigger.

Politicians everywhere started lamenting the shrill political “rhetoric” of the last two years, and bloviate on how we need to be more “civil” in our public discourse. But we heard no such calls for political “civility” during the Bush years when a book and movie came out detailing how to assassinate him, or when left wing blogs depicted him as Hitler, or when he was accused of knowing about the 911 attack plans in advance but did nothing about it, etc., etc., etc. for eight years. No, all of that was fine, but now suddenly we need “civility”.

One member of the House demanded that the bulls eye symbol be banned from political speech and print even though the terminology of “targeted” races and districts has been in the political lexicon for decades and used extensively by everyone, with no apparent ill effects.

All of this paroxysm over political speech was in spite of one of Mr. Loughner’s friends saying that he was not in any way political, didn’t listen to the news, wasn’t left – right – or center, wasn’t a Republican or Democrat, that he really wasn’t anything, and that even President Obama said there was no link between political discourse and the shootings.

Then there was that “memorial service”.

Not one member of the clergy spoke at this event; no priest, pastor, rabbi, minister, preacher, elder, deacon, or anybody of the cloth. A Native American witch doctor was prominently featured, though, even though none of the victims were a member of that demographic. And there were two members of the President’s cabinet, i.e., politcians, reading from the Bible.
The Master of Ceremonies of the service was a college president who had no apparent connection to any of the people affected by the tragedy. He seemed to function as chief cheerleader with lots of students clapping and cheering and generally whooping it up. At a memorial service for the six dead and six wounded.

Then President Obama tried to position himself as a miracle worker by saying that after he visited Ms. Giffords, she immediately opened her eyes for the first time.

The President also said that as a result of this tragedy, we all need to try to be better people. As a Christian, I do believe that I (and everyone) need to continually strive to be a better person. I believe this and try to do it because of what I read in the Bible and what I hear at church, not because of the actions of some deranged madman.

I have a suggestion for the President. If he wants to move us all towards being better people, he should exhort everyone to attend church regularly and to live their lives according to what they learn there. He could also encourage everyone to read and contemplate the Bible on a regular basis. And he could lead by example.

Now we have Congress saying that this event has inspired them to sit together during the President’s upcoming State Of The Union address, rather than have Democrats on one side of the room and Republicans on the other, as is the normal custom. Let me make sure I understand what the people running the country have learned from the horrific actions resulting from a truly dysfunctional mind: They need to sit together at the next political event. Maybe they could also hold hands and sing Kumbaya. I‘m sure all of that will deter the next lunatic from going on a rampage.

And here is the most bizarre part. What you don’t hear any of these people saying is the aspect that is the true lesson to be learned from this tragedy. The real eye opener is that our mental heath system is seriously broken.

Here we have a person, Jared Loughner, who by all accounts was truly deranged, and getting worse as time went on. His college classmates wrote emails about how they feared him and sat by the door so that if he flipped out, they could get out quickly. His class instructors complained to the administration about his bizarre and sometimes violent behavior and statements. After several episodes, he was expelled from college. But the college administrations did not give any information on him to the local police.

Mr. Loughner tried to join the military, but was denied due to “excessive” drug use. Again, no information was shared with local authorities.

Mr. Loughner had a rap sheet, having been arrested for drugs and other things.

It seems his parents were also very concerned about him, but it’s not apparent that they took any resolute actions to get him some help whether he wanted it or not.

He had put up some sort of a pagan alter in his back yard, complete with a human skull and rotting fruits.

And through all of this, somehow the dots were not connected, or if they were, nothing was done about it. Mr. Loughner needed help; he needed to be institutionalized. But he got nothing; he just ran around loose.

The final straw: About a half hour before he started shooting, he was stopped for running a red light, and given a warning.

Forget all of this nonsense about civility, rhetoric, sitting together, blah, blah, blah. No one can seriously argue that any of that had the slightest connection to the shooting or will do anything to deter the next one. The real tragedy here is that this was preventable. We had a true psychopath running around loose, and almost everyone he came into contact with knew that he was seriously unbalanced. Intervention was obviously needed, and it didn’t happen. That is why six people are dead and six others wounded.

The Beginning Of The End Of Obamacare

2011-01-21T08:26:00.000-08:00

Last night, the House of Representatives, the legislative chamber of Congress closest to American popular opinion, voted to repeal Obamacare—the increasingly unpopular law which led directly to a change in the control of Congress just three months ago.

Many will tell you that yesterday’s bipartisan vote of 245 to 189 was an exercise in futility—an empty, symbolic measure. Liberals in Congress, the White House and their echo chamber in the media all insist, as NPR has duly reported, that “this measure will go no further.”

Don’t believe this for a single minute. The vote last night was an important step in the democratic process of protecting and conserving our constitutional freedoms.

Our country, it is increasingly clear, has arrived at a pivotal moment – perhaps the pivotal moment – in its history. Together, we face a choice between two futures. One is a collectivist future where the federal government claims ever increasing shares of our income and grants itself the authority to make decisions affecting virtually every aspect of our daily lives. The other future is built upon the idea that individual freedom trumps government authority, and that in those rare cases when solving a problem requires government, the government that governs best is the one that is smallest and closest to the people. That is the future that we should seek – reaffirming our individual liberty, strengthening private markets, shrinking the size of governments, and making decisions wherever possible at the local level rather than in Washington.

No issue joins this debate more dramatically than the question of Obamacare, and what to do about it. It’s not just about health care. The law redefines our centuries-old understanding of the reach of federal authority, indeed whether there are any limits at all to the government’s ability to intrude upon individuals, families, business owners, physicians and other health providers, and state and local governments. Little or nothing will be allowed outside the new regulatory scheme – no alternative state programs, no individuals or businesses that choose not to participate, no truly private market alternatives.

The debate boils down to one big question: Shall we govern ourselves, or let unelected bureaucrats rule us?

Behind this question are the many other specific ones about health care:
Should the federal government control America’s $2.5 trillion health sector, fully one sixth of our economy?
Should government bureaucrats decide what form of health coverage is “acceptable”?
Should these bureaucrats be given the legal authority to require all Americans to purchase government-designed health plans and levy penalties on those who don’t comply?
Should the federal government require the States to devote scarce resources to the creation of federally designed health exchanges that State lawmakers may feel inadequately address the unique needs of state residents?
Should the federal government expand the Medicaid program so dramatically that States face a Hobson’s choice – either shoulder billions in new fiscal commitments (on top of an already unsustainable budget mess) or withdraw from the program entirely?
What about employers who want to continue to provide their employees with health coverage but learn that federal bureaucrats deem the coverage they can afford to provide insufficiently generous?
And these are but the most obvious concerns raised by last year’s law.

But what comes next, you ask?

First, it is incumbent on the Majority leader of the Senate, Harry Reid (D-NV) to allow a vote on the floor of that chamber. A bipartisan majority in one half of Congress has just repealed the most ambitious expansion of the federal government in many decades following a major electoral reversal for his party. For Mr. Reid to prevent this vote from coming to the Senate floor would be to thumb his nose at the will of the American people. Senators must be allowed to vote on this question so that repeal legislation might go to the president for his consideration.

In the meantime, Heritage Distinguished Fellow Ernest Istook (who sat on the Appropriations Committee for 14 years) and Government Relations Director Brian Darling say that an incremental strategy is critical. To start the de facto repeal of Obamacare, lawmakers should focus on dismantling the key provisions that form the very foundation of the law’s architecture. This means, for example, going after the pillars of the law through a variety of means like de-funding its critical aspects, engaging in aggressive oversight of the consequences of the law and enacting legislative triggers to delay or block its implementation. All these approaches will contribute to Obamacare’s implosion.

While that important national debate is taking place, the House of Representatives can move to defund provisions of Obamacare through either a rescissions package or funding riders. Congress is not required to fund this law or the myriad of new programs that it spawned. Like every other federal program, the current Congress can adjust – or even zero out – the level of funding for the implementation of Obamacare. Special provisions in the health care law will complicate the process, but the propriety of de-funding is unquestionable. As noted by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), “Congress is not required to provide funds for every agency or purpose authorized by law.”

De-funding is a legitimate use of the power of the purse that the Founding Fathers wisely granted to Congress. It won’t be easy. Obamacare was designed to be the governmental equivalent of kudzu – growing everywhere. However, Obamacare is not a fait accompli, no matter what the Left is telling you.

After a clean repeal we can move on to debate what good ideas on health care can be adopted in the future, as Heritage health care expert Nina Owcharenko does in her report, “Repealing Obamacare and Getting Healthcare Right.”

The House of Representatives acted wisely last night. Now the debate opens again. It’s a national debate we need to have, and we need to have it now. Don’t listen to those who want to stifle this debate, or close this controversy. There’s nothing uncivil about standing up for your freedoms. This is no time for summer soldiers and sunshine patriots.

None of our work on Obamacare would be possible without the dedicated support of our 710,000 members from around the nation. Support us as we keep the momentum going for repeal.
Sincerely,

Edwin J. Feulner, Ph.D.
President
The Heritage Foundation

Virginia Tech Wants To Do Away With Virginia Cooperative Extension and 4H

2011-01-20T14:02:00.000-08:00

Abingdon, Jan.6, 2011 -- A public hearing was held at the Southwest Virginia Higher Education Center to discuss the Governor’s budget amendments. Approximately 300 people attended and 75 people made statements. A panel including Delegate Phillips, Senator Reynolds, and Senator Wampler listened to the statements. Ten youth and adults supporting Virginia Cooperative Extension (VCE) spoke including Deborah Ring of Pulaski County. A summary of their comments is given below.

In the 2010 budget, the General Assembly stated the following: “It is the intent of the General Assembly that the Cooperative Extension Service gives highest priority to programs and services which comprised the original mission of the Extension Service, especially agricultural programs at the local level.” The original mission includes education for 4-H youth, assistance with agriculture and natural resources, and education for families.

Because of needed budget reductions, the state budget committee directed Dr. Alan Grant, Dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Virginia Tech, to appoint a committee to propose an Extension restructuring plan. Unfortunately, Dr. Grant did not follow the direction of the General Assembly. The plan was developed by nine research professors and administrators. There were no field agents, consumers, or the public involved. Because of its one-sided composition, the committee will not recommend equitable cuts in the research area vs. the field agent area.

This was illustrated with the restructuring plan unveiled by Dr. Grant on October 7, 2010, which regionalizes Virginia Cooperative Extension (VCE) staff and programs. This plan threatens the very existence of VCE by eliminating two key components of Land Grant Universities – outreach and local presence. In addition, Virginia Tech has not outlined how much money will be saved by this plan.

On December 17, 2010, Dr. Grant announced new “implementation teams” which will include consumers and field agents in “detailed discussions”. However, these teams are working within the framework already set by the original committee and final decisions will be made by the currently stacked committee. So, this is no solution.

The Governor’s budget amendment contains $494,410 to support implementation of this flawed restructuring plan. This amendment must not be approved by the General Assembly.

The current restructuring plan must be scrapped and a new committee formed to include field agents and consumers. There should also be a very close look at how current funds have been spent and what is actually funded.

VCE field offices have been in existence serving Virginians since 1914. VCE field offices must not be deconstructed in favor of professors, researchers, and administrators. Local field agents are the element of VCE that directly serve local farmers, youth, and families.

###

Contact: Deborah Ring, Co-Chairman of the Virginia Extension Advocacy Committee
Email: debby-ring@att.net

Home Foreclosure Problem To Get Worse In 2011

2011-01-17T12:01:00.001-08:00

Associated Press headline, Jan. 13, 2011: "Over 1 million Americans Seen Losing Homes In 2011"

In 2010, 2.8 million people had some sort of foreclosure action taken on their house, ranging from a notice to outright foreclosure, of which there were a million. In 2011, housing industry experts expect the number of home foreclosures to rise to 1.2 million.

Did you get that: After trillions of dollars in TARP and bailouts and various government programs to pay people's mortgages or otherwise keep them in their houses, the home foreclosure problem is getting worse!!!

How's that "hope and change" working out for you?

By the way, have you heard anything about this on the alphabet networks?

Correcting the Roanoke Times - Again

2011-01-14T13:34:00.000-08:00

Click on the image to see a larger version.

Hate Speech From Liberals

2011-01-13T09:04:00.000-08:00

Media Reality Check. “While Media Indict Conservative Speech, Left's Lunacy Is Ignored”

Below is the text of a Media Reality Check, compiled by the MRC’s Rich Noyes, which was posted this afternoon.

To read it online, with two video clips and four audio clips from radio hosts, plus links to more examples of liberal hate speech:
http://www.mrc.org/realitycheck/realitycheck/2011/20110111020540.aspx

Now the text of the Tuesday, January 11, 2011 Media Reality Check:

While Media Indict Conservative Speech, Left's Lunacy Is Ignored

Three days after a mentally-deranged man — whose backyard in Arizona featured a bizarre shrine decorated with a human skull and rotted oranges — killed six people and severely wounded Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, the liberal media continue to cynically link Sarah Palin, the Tea Party and mainstream conservatives with the crime.

There is, of course, absolutely no evidence that “heated rhetoric” in any way motivated Jarred Loughner’s shooting spree, but the media’s repeated association of political speech with the attack suggests an attempt to exploit the tragedy to discredit mainstream conservatives by smearing them as somehow culpable.

“Giffords was one of 20 Democrats whose districts were lit up in cross-hairs on a Sarah Palin campaign Web site last spring,” CBS’s Nancy Cordes declared Saturday night in referring to a political map, adding that “Giffords and many others complained that someone unstable might act on that imagery.” Hours later on CNN, Jessica Yellin admitted “we don’t know the motive” before proceeding to raise how “on Twitter and Facebook, there is a lot of talk, in particular, about Sarah Palin.” On Sunday’s Today, leading into a clip about Palin, NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell asserted: “Giffords, a conservative Democrat, was concerned about heated campaign rhetoric from the Tea Party.”

An editorial in Monday’s New York Times justified the focus on conservatives: “It is legitimate to hold Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible for the gale of anger that has produced the vast majority of these threats, setting the nation on edge.” But while the liberal media indict Palin and other conservatives, there’s a long list of vicious rhetoric coming from media liberals.

MSNBC has been the most venomous, a fact NBC has glossed over in its coverage castigating conservatives. The network’s 8pm ET host Keith Olbermann in 2009 referred to columnist Michelle Malkin as “a big mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it.” Hardball’s Chris Matthews fantasized about the death of Rush Limbaugh: “Somebody’s going to jam a CO2 pellet into his head and he’s going to explode like a giant blimp.”

The outrage evidenced this week was not to be found when a film festival showed “Death of a President,” a movie depicting the imagined assassination of President Bush. “Poor taste or, as some say, thought-provoking?” MSNBC daytime anchor Amy Robach mildly wondered on September 1, 2006.

On Monday’s The Ed Show, MSNBC’s 6pm ET host Ed Schultz pointed his finger at Fox News for supposedly inciting its audience to “think that doing something radical is the right thing to do,” but sidestepped his own history of shocking comments. “I get passionate, but not in a violent way,” Schultz insisted.

On his national radio show in 2009, however, Schultz wished for Dick Cheney’s death: “He is an enemy of the country, in my opinion, Dick Cheney is, he is an enemy of the country....Lord, take him to the Promised Land, will you?” In 2010, Schultz screamed that “Dick Cheney’s heart’s a political football. We ought to rip it out and kick it around and stuff it back in him!”

Other left-wing radio hosts have openly desired the death of leading conservatives without a peep from the liberal media elites. Radio host Mike Malloy (a onetime news writer for CNN) wished for Rush Limbaugh’s demise on January 4, 2010, a few days after the conservative host was hospitalized for chest pains: “I’m waiting for the day when I pick it up, pick up a newspaper or click on the Internet and find out he’s choked to death on his own throat fat or a great big wad of saliva or something, you know, whatever. Go away, Rush, you make me sick!”

In 2009, then-Air America radio host Montel Williams urged Congresswoman Michele Bachmann to kill herself: “Slit your wrist! Go ahead! I mean, you know, why not? I mean, if you want to — or, you know, do us all a better thing. Move that knife up about two feet. I mean, start right at the collarbone.”

If Bachmann had been the Congresswoman attacked this weekend instead of Giffords, would the media be as strong in their attacks of the overheated rhetoric lobbed against her over the past several years?

HBO’s Bill Maher, a favorite guest on CNN and other supposedly respectable news networks, wished for the deaths of both Limbaugh and Cheney. Talking about the then-Vice President in 2007, after al Qaeda exploded a truck bomb at a base in Afghanistan near where Cheney was visiting, Maher argued: “I’m just saying if he did die, other people, more people would live. That’s a fact.”

In 2008, Maher morbidly suggested Limbaugh would have been a better candidate to have died from a drug overdose: “Why couldn’t he have croaked from it instead of Heath Ledger?”

Among the claims this week is that anti-government rhetoric is putting public servants in peril. If such a dubious claim is true, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann was jeopardizing lives when he teed off against the government’s anti-terrorism policies in 2006: “We now face what our ancestors faced at other times of exaggerated crisis and melodramatic fear-mongering: A government more dangerous to our liberty than is the enemy it claims to protect us from.”

Media gadfly Arianna Huffington made her own plea for civility, telling the Washington Post via e-mail this weekend that “there are lots of ways to be lively and put forth a strong opinion without demonizing one’s opponent....It’s the demonization that is the problem.”

But her Huffington Post blog site has demonized conservatives for years, including an item posted in early 2007 mocking the cancer that would eventually take the life of White House press secretary Tony Snow. Sneered San Francisco radio host Charles Karel Bouley: “I hear about Tony Snow and say to myself, well, stand up every day, lie to the American people at the behest of your dictator-esque boss and well, how could a cancer NOT grow in you. Work for Fox News, spinning the truth in to a billion knots and how can your gut not rot?”

The Left has been trying for years to shut down conservative radio and otherwise criminalize conservative speech. Using this tragedy to further that agenda is beyond cynical, and probably counterproductive: a new CBS News poll finds that even after a weekend of anti-conservative propaganda, 57% don’t think “harsh political rhetoric” had anything to do with the shootings.

But if the media insist on having a debate about political speech, they need to focus on the Left’s vileness as well. Otherwise, they’re just partisan hypocrites joining in the exploitation of tragedy for political gain.

END Reprint of Media Reality Check

Truly Despicable

2011-01-09T12:54:00.000-08:00

No matter how cynical I get , I can't keep up.

Some people are already, while Ms. Giffords' life hangs in the balance, trying to exploit the tragedy in Arizonan for political gain. These people are actually saying that those who disagreed with them on the issues and spoke out about it are responsible for what happened because this "rhetoric" motivated the wacko who started shooting. Yes, it's all the fault of conservatives, tea partiers, Sarah Palin, Republicans, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Fox News, of anyone whose viewpoints these people don't like.

It is truly despicable that someone would try to exploit this horrific event for political gain by throwing around such reckless charges.

As for me, I'll pray for her and the others.

Rediscovering My Coal Country Roots

2011-01-07T10:39:00.000-08:00

My father and grandfather were coal miners in Virginia and West Virginia. My father was born and raised in Dante, Virginia in Russell County in the early 1900’s when it was a booming coal town. Later, he went to Caretta, West Virginia and worked at the mine there for twelve years.

Caretta is about five miles from Coalwood, another mining town, that was made famous by Homer Hickam and the other “Rocket Boys”. The mines at Caretta and Coalwood were owned by the same company.
Homer’s father was the mine superintendant at the Coalwood mine, and he loved his work. But Homer marched to the beat of a different drummer, and was inspired by Sputnik to start building model rockets while he was in high school. He read a lot on the subject, kept experimenting, recruited some friends to help, and progressed to the point that he and his cohorts were building some pretty sophisticated rockets. A teacher suggested he enter his work in the science fair, and, to make a long story short, he ended up winning first place at the national science fair, which became a source of great local pride.

Homer then went to Virginia Tech and upon graduation got a job at NASA where he worked until retirement.

When he was nearing retirement, someone made an off-hand suggestion that he write a book about his model rocket building experiences. Homer, being the kind of guy he was, jumped on this idea and did write just such a book. It was a great success which was also turned into a move titled “October Sky”. He also wrote several sequels. All of this sent Homer, the other rocket boys, and Coalwood into national prominence.

Now, every year on the first weekend in October, the October Sky festival is held in Coalwood. Due to my strong personal ties to the same coal towns as Homer Hickam, I have wanted to go to this festival for some time. This year, I did, and my wife went with me so as to see some of my family heritage.

There are only two hotels in that area, the Count Gilu Motel (I am still wondering who Count Gilu was) and the Elkhorn Inn, a bed and breakfast establishment in Landgraff, WV. We opted for some local color and stayed at the Inn. When we made the reservation, we were asked if we wanted a room with a view, the view being of the railroad tracks. We said yes.

Upon arrival, we had a moment of “what have we gotten into” because the Inn needed painting and a bush had grown in front of the sign. I said to Mrs. Ring, “How did you find this place?”

Once we went in, things got better. The condition of the rooms was adequate if not luxurious. We learned that the building was once a “clubhouse” for miners which had fallen into serious disrepair. The current owners bought it with the intent of fixing it up and starting a bed and breakfast, which they have done, although it is still a work in progress.

Dinner is available if you pre-order, which we did since there was nowhere else to go. The husband of the ownership team is also the chef. He food turned out to be quite good, a highlight, actually. Entrée’s included roast Cornish hen, shrimp and fettucini, scallops, salmon with dill sauce, and others.

As we sat down to dinner Friday night, some people came in the front door, and the owners dropped everything to greet them. After a couple of minutes, the inn keeper came to me and discreetly said, “That’s Homer Hickam.”

Actually, it was Homer Hickam, Mrs. Hickam, and Randy Stribling, an actor that played a small part in the movie. We chatted, had a glass of wine together, took pictures, got our book signed, and felt like we were part of the “in crowd”.

Saturday, we went to Coalwood and the festival. There was a parade including the Concord University marching band, music, food, and speeches. Of most interest were the remarks by four of the five original rocket boys, comments by the 90 year old father of one of the rocket boys, and some words from the mine shop machinist who played a key role in saving chief rocket boy Homer Hickam from disaster at the national science fair, which you will have to read the book to get the whole story on.

There was also a “coal heritage museum” set up under a tent where various coal mining artifacts and memorabilia were on display by a collector. He had a stack of “Coalwood – Caretta News” newspapers from the early 1940’s that he had stumbled across at a yard sale. These got my attention since my parents were there at that time, so I browsed through them. I saw that this newspaper had a “personals” section, as many local newspapers do, that reported on who of the local populace was having visitors, who had a birthday party, school events, church news, and other such down home news. I was thinking that it’s a long shot, but maybe my family might be mentioned in there somewhere, so I skimmed through the “personals” of each newspaper and struck gold twice. My sister was listed as one of a group of girls who went on a Girl Scout outing, and another sister was among those attending a birthday party!! I asked if I could buy these papers, but he was adamant that they were not for sale. So I took pictures of the relevant sections.

After lunch, we drove five miles over the mountain to Caretta, the town where my family lived for twelve years while my father worked at the mine. We saw the building that had housed the company store where my mother would have bought almost everything; we saw the old mine buildings that my father must have worked in; we saw the small house where my family lived (a company house at the time); and we saw that the mine is still in operation to at least some degree. It was a real spiritual journey for me.

We drove on down the road to War – yes, that’s the name of the place – War. My brother was born in War. When my family first went to that area, apparently no company house was available in Caretta, so they lived just down the road in War for about a year until they could get a house in Caretta.

I was curious as to how the town came to be named “War”, so I asked around. The story I got was that some early pioneers had a major skirmish with the Indians. This happened on the banks a creek which became known as War Creek, and over time it was reduced to simply “War”.

By this time, it was late afternoon and time to head back to the inn. One of the major attractions of this inn is train watching. The inn is right across the street from the main line of Norfolk Southern, and many trains come through. A lot of them are coal drags, but many consist of containerized freight, since this line is also part of the “inland corridor” which is the shortest route from the ports on the Eastern Shore to Chicago. This route also goes through Radford, by the way, and the whole route has recently been “upgraded” to allow double-decker containerized freight cars to get through the tunnels.

Anyway, we initially thought that train watching would be pretty dull, but we went out on the front balcony (which you had to duck through what used to be a window to get to) to take a look. After the first train, we were hooked. It was mesmerizing. Whenever we heard a train whistle in the distance, we would rush out to the balcony. An added benefit was that we heard them all through the night in our room!

This particular section of track is on a grade, so the trains going in one direction (up grade) must have “pushers”. Pushers are engines added to the end of the train to help it get up the grade. The long coal drags had two pushers, and the freight trains had one. After the train went by up grade, a few minutes later the pushers would come back down alone to wait somewhere for the next train going up.

After a memorable dinner prepared by Chef Dan, who hovered around the table to make sure everything was just right, we retired to the TV room to watch “October Sky” again, the movie about the rocket boys. Then it was off to bed, with the comforting sound of a train coming through from time to time.

My wife thinks the inn is haunted because she insists she heard the doorknob being rattled during the night, but I didn’t hear that. I did wake up once to a noise that I thought was right beside the bed, but nothing was there. I still don’t think the place is haunted, though.

Next morning, we had the breakfast part of B and B, and then drove home.

It was a very memorable and personally meaningful weekend for me.

Whose Playing Politics?

2011-01-05T13:10:00.000-08:00

Associated Press headline on Jan. 4, 2011: "Obama exhorts Republicans to put politics aside."

Obama wants Republicans to put politics aside, but not Democrats? I guess the Democrats haven't engaged in anything so crass as "politics" during the last two years. It wasn't "politics" when the Democrats "deemed" the Obamacare bill to be passed rather than actually voting on it. It wasn't "politics" when the Democrats kept Congress in session into Christmas Eve. It wasn't politics on the part of the Democrats when they passed the stimulus without one Republican vote in the House. It wasn't "politics" when David Letterman (don't anyone try to tell me he's a Republican) joked on national TV about Sarah Palin's teenage daughter possibly being being raped during a trip to New York. It wasn't "politics" when Democrat Nancy Pelosi said the tea partiers were akin to Naxis. Etc., etc., etc. No, none of that stuff we've seen spewing out of the Democrats in Washington for the last two years was "politics". But now that the Republicans are in control of the House and they have more votes in the Senate, Mr. Obama suddenly is concerned about "politics" in Washington. Obama wants the Republicans, but not the Democrats, to refrain from engaging in "politics".

I'm breathless.

Since the Democrats are exempted from Mr. Obama's moral clarion call for a cease to "politics", Democrat Debbie Wasserman Schultz felt free to say recently that Republicans want Americans to die, as evidenced by the Republicans' push to repeal Obamacare.

Tom Perriello Exposes The Liberal Mindset

2011-01-03T13:23:00.000-08:00

Tom Perriello is a liberal Democrat who was turned out of office in Virginia's 5th. Congressional in the last election and replaced by Republican Robert Hurt. In a recent interview, Mr. Perriello acknowledged that he lost the election because of his votes for the stimulus, Obamacare, cap and trade, bank bailouts, auto company bailouts, trillions of deficit spending of all sort, etc. He also said that the country needs more people like him who are willing to vote contrary to public sentiment, even if it means not getting re-elected.

Former Congressman Perriello has just given us a starkly clear picture of the elitist liberal mindset. They believe that they are rulers, not representatives; that they know better than we what is good for us; and that the country would be better off if there were more people in Congress who were willing to ram their socialist agenda down the people's collective throat.

Brave New World Of Government Health Care

2010-12-27T14:04:00.001-08:00

Do you remember back during the debate on Obamacare when Sarah Palin said it would lead to death panels? The supporters of the government takeover of healthcare went nuts. The said there absolutely would not be any death panels, Sarah was an idiot and had no idea what she was talking about, how could she be so stupid, etc., etc., etc.

I have news: The death panels are already here.

There is a new drug out for the treatment of advanced prostate cancer. It has been shown to increase life by an average of four months in such patients. But, the drug is expensive; the treatment for the four months costs about $100,000, or around $25,000 per month.

A Medicare panel is deciding whether or not Medicare will cover the use of this drug.

Now, $25,000 a month is expensive. A person in that situation, however, might think it’s worth it. But the decision of whether such patients get to live for four additional months is not going to be made by the patient and his family, or the patient and his doctor, or even the patient and some evil insurance company. No, this decision is being made by a bunch of nameless, faceless, unaccountable bureaucrats buried deep in the Medicare labyrinth. A death panel, in other words. The death panels are a-l-r-e-a-d-y here.

Do you also remember back during the debate on Obamacare when some people pointed out that once the government got control of our health care, they would use that as the reason to take over almost all aspects of our lives? The government’s justification, it was predicted, would be that since the government is paying for our healthcare, the government would assume the right to take whatever steps it feels are necessary to keep us “healthy”, thereby keeping healthcare costs down. Again, the people predicting this were ridiculed and vilified by those pushing the government takeover of health care.

I have more news: This, too, is a-l-r-e-a-d-y happening.

Congress recently passed and President Obama signed into law a $4.5 billion bill that dictates to schools what they can and cannot do concerning food served on school premises. This is being done, we are told, in order to reduce childhood obesity and thus reduce healthcare costs. The bill gives the government the power to decide what kinds of foods may be sold in school lunch lines and in school vending machines. The bill could even limit “frequent” school bake sales and fundraisers that give kids more opportunities to eat brownies and pizza instead of foods deemed to “healthy” by the government.

The way this will work is that the federal government can now impose new nutrition standards on schools. These standards will cover not only what kinds of foods may be sold, but also what ingredients can be used. These new nutrition standards will be written by the Department of Agriculture.

It gets worse. The bill also will limit the number of school bake sales and other school fundraisers that sell “unhealthy” food such as burgers and fries, brownies, cakes, and cookies. Such events could only be held “infrequently” under this new law. Again, the Department of Agriculture is empowered to determine how often such events can be held.

I can just see it. At the “health food sale” before the high school football game, the PTA will be selling bean curd, lettuce, spinach, apples, celery, carrots, V8 juice, and other such goodies. During half time, the concession stand will sell salads, granola, and skim milk. Prominently displayed in both cases will be their federal government permit and foodstuff approval. I’m sure they will make lots of money for their latest school improvement projects.

We have now reached a point where the federal government will determine what your children are allowed to eat in school and how often bake sales can be held. These decisions will not be made by the PTA, local school cooks or nutritionists, school principals, the superintendent, or the school board; these decisions will be made by bureaucrats in the Department of Agriculture.

Did you get that? If you want to have a bake sale, the Feds will be making sure you don’t do it too often. In order to have a bake sale beyond your government decreed limit, you’ll have to fill out a bunch of paperwork and get approval from the Feds. For a bake sale!!!!

This is all in the name of reducing the government’s tab for health care costs, as was predicted.

There will undoubtedly be much more to come in the brave, new world of government run healthcare.

Good Tidings of Great Joy

2010-12-24T11:35:00.000-08:00

Isaiah 9: 6-7

"For unto us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be on upon his shoulder, and his name shall be 'Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace'. Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, upon the thrones of David, and over his kingdom, to establish it, and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and for evermore."

Now The World Is Safe

2010-12-23T12:59:00.000-08:00

The mentality of the people pushing nuclear disarmament is that if the U.S. doesn't give up it's nuclear weapons today, the whole world will be vaporized tomorrow by widespread thermo-nuclear war. I continually am amazed at how much sheer idiocy passes for reasoned thought in the public policy forum.

The U.S. Senate yesterday ratified the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with Russia. Under the terms of this treaty, the U.S. will have to reduce it's deployed nuclear delivery systems, but Russia will not have to get rid one. The delivery systems are more significant that the actual nuclear warheads, since a warhead is of no use if it can't be sent to a target. So we have to reduce the number of deployed nuclear delivery systems, but Russia doesn't (because they are already below the limit). Does everyone feel safe, now?

I have a few very significant questions for the nuclear disarmament people:

1. Does anyone in the world have to be worried about being nuked by the U.S. or Russia, the countries signing this treaty?
2. Does anyone in the world have to be worried about being nuked by Pakistan, Iran, or North Korea, who are not covered by this treaty?
3. Now that the U.S. has proved it's righteousness to the world with regards to nuclear weapons via START, how long will it be before Iran stops developing a nuclear bomb? They will now stop, won't they?
4. Now that the U.S. has proved it's righteousness to the world with regards to nuclear weapons via START, will the little maniacal despot in North Korea see the error of his ways and destroy his nuclear weapons (or stop trying to get them)? How long will it be before he does that? He will now stop, won't he?
5. If all of the nuclear weapons in the world vanished this instant, would the slaughter of millions of people in Sudan, Congo, and Liberia stop?

Here is my challenge to the nuclear disarmament people: Comment on this posting with your specific answers to the above questions, one by one. Platitudes and moralizing will not be accepted; only specific answers to these questions will be accepted.

More Terrorists Attack Attempts In The Last Two Years.

2010-12-21T14:49:00.000-08:00

James Carafano, a national security expert at The Heritage Foundation, reported on a news show today that there have been a total of 36 foiled terrorist attempts on the U.S. since 911 (some major, some minor), and that there has been an uptick in attempts in the last two years, and particularly in the last year.

More terrorists attempts in the last two years. Hmmmmm. What changed a couple of years ago that could lead terrorists to increase their efforts in attacking us? Maybe perceived weakness in our national leadership?

Meanwhile, Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Homeland Security, said recently that her department in working hard on the threat posed by global warming

Gingrich and Cuccinelli At Heritage Foundation

2010-12-19T13:48:00.000-08:00

At Heritage's President’s Club, Gingrich Calls for New Conservative Revolution

The keynote speaker at Heritage's annual President’s Club dinner in Washington on Dec. 9 and 10, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, did not disappoint.

Gingrich outlined his plan for a new conservative revolution, suggesting 2021 as a date by which America will be re-oriented towards conservative principles. And, the former Georgia Congressman added, “there is no better place than The Heritage Foundation to create a new outline of the conservative movement.”

Speaking to the unique nature of power, Gingrich explored the differences between how liberals and conservatives view the source of power. In the conservative view—the view of the Founders, the view that makes America exceptional—”power comes from God to each one of you personally. You loan power to the state. The state never loans power to you.”

Gingrich explained a plan to teach American exceptionalism to future generations. He demanded that “every student in a school: elementary, high school, and college, if funded by tax dollars, should encounter the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.”

Addressing the controversy over TSA screenings, Gingrich said what should be obvious: “We have to tell the truth about who is trying to kill us and act on that truth… Checking out an 83-year-old nun from Des Moines is not national security. It’s stupidity.”

To watch Gingrich's full remarks, go to myHeritage.org.

Read more coverage of this year's President's Club meeting, including speeches by Sen. Jim DeMint, Erick Erickson, Heritage President Ed Feulner, and more.

Cuccinelli Calls for 'Federalism in Action' at President’s Club

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli made a rousing case for “federalism in action” and for reading the Constitution as it was written during an address last week to The Heritage Foundation’s annual President’s Club meeting in Washington.

Cuccinelli, who has led the legal charge against Obamacare, said it’s encouraging that states are starting to check federal power–”and that’s exactly what the Founders intended.”

Cuccinelli's legal case against Obamacare, stating that the individual mandate is in violation of the Commerce clause of the Constitution, was recently upheld by a federal judge.

“This is supposed to be a government of limited, enumerated powers,” he said. “It would no longer be such if we lose this case” and overreaches of federal power like individual mandate are allowed to stand.

“The health care fight is not about health care,” he added. “It is about liberty.”

But Obamacare is hardly the only threat to constitutional government and liberty, Cuccinelli argued. Government agencies like the EPA and NLRB are “smothering liberty” with their regulations that micromanage Americans’ lives and overstep the federal government’s authority.

Defeating these assaults on liberty will require conservatives to return again and again to America’s first principles. Cuccinelli cited the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights, which held "that no free government, or the blessing of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue, and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles."

To ensure these principles endure, he argued that conservatives must educate the American people about why the Founders’ principles matter. And, he said, “Heritage is a key player in this.”

“We can fight back,” he concluded. “We can win this battle.”

Republicans Vote For A Big Tax Increase

2010-12-14T09:23:00.000-08:00

The tax deal passed this week in Washington contains an increase in the death tax (a.k.a. estate tax) from the current level of zero percent to 35% in some cases. Many Republicans in the House and Senate voted for this.

The death tax is arguably truly evil. Here's how it works. Let's say you work hard all your life and pay your taxes. You manage to save over the years from what the government doesn't take from you, and you build up a nest egg. Being a frugal and self-reliant person, you save it instead of spending it. Who knows, someday, you may need that money. As a result, when you die, your nest egg is still there. Remember, it's all money left over from the many taxes you paid during your life. But when you die, you will pay a 35% tax on your "estate" (actually, your "estate" will pay the tax, but let's not get into technicalities). So, for example, if you managed to save up $100,000, when you die, the government will take $35,000 of it, if the estate tax is 35%.

Yes, I know that the bill just passed in Congress exempts estates valued at under $10 million; but the push over time will no doubt be to lower that threshold as we continue to hear about making the rich pay their fair share.

There are even more pernicious aspects to an estate tax.

Keep in mind that a person's "estate" consists of everything they own, not just money in the bank. One's estate includes land, buildings, personal property, everything. So when a person dies, the total value of everything they own is added up and that is the amount that would be subject to estate tax laws.

Consider small, family farmers. Many of them are land rich and cash poor. A small farm of two or three hundred acres that has been in the family for generations may be worth a few million dollars due to the increased market price of the land over time, but the farmer's current annual income may very well be modest, since it takes a lot of acreage to make a little money in farming. $200 per acre is considered a standard rate of return for many small farms. So the value of the small farmer's land may be high, but his income will probably be very moderate. When such a farmer dies, his "estate" will include the value of the land, and if it goes over the exemption limit, his heirs would have to pay the estate tax. If the estate hits that $10 million mark that is in the recently passed law, the 35% tax would be levied, which comes to $3,500,000. Since the small farmer almost surely does not have that much money in the bank, in order to pay the estate tax, his heirs would have to sell off a big chunk of the farm (or cough up the money themselves).

So the government is essentially confiscating one's property via the estate tax when they die. Truly evil.

As I said, the current death tax (a.k.a. estate tax) is zero percent across the board, and the new tax "compromise" raises it to 35% on estates valued at $10 million or grater, a hugh increase. Many Republicans in both the House and Senate voted for this tax "compromise" bill. In addition, the stage is now set for the exemption limit to be under continual attack in attempts to lower it, thereby causing more and more people to pay the death tax. Anyone who resists these attempts to continually lower the estate tax exemption limit will be demonized as not wanting the "rich" to pay their fair share. Thanks, Republicans.

Business As Usual In Washington

2010-12-12T12:59:00.000-08:00

One commentator said that the Americn people didn't have an election in November, they issued a restraining order. Senator Jim DeMint said that the election results were't a mandate for Republicans, but rather the Republicans had been given a second chance.

It seems as though the Republican leadership still doesn't get it.

The tax compromise recently struck by Obama and the Republican leaders (McConnell and Boehner) is more "business as usual" in Washington. It's as though the election never happened; nothing has changed in their approach.

The tax proposal does leave all current tax rates in place, thus preventing an economic catrastropy come January 1 by raising taxes. But the extension of current tax rates is only for two years. Our fearless leaders are just kicking that can down the road. It does nothing to remove the tax uncertainty on businesses, thus still leaving them reluctant to spend money by hiring. They still have that looming tax increase (in two years) hanging over their heads.

Message to Republicans: You won the election!! People want to see a new approach coming out of Washington, not more of the same old political maneuvering. If keeping tax rates where they are now is a good thing, then it's also good in two years. Fight that battle now, Republicans, while you are fresh off of a big election win; don't leave it hanging out there. The tax rates should be made permanent. Do that, and let the Dems propose tax increases whenever they so desire. "The votes aren't there", you say. Well, in January, they will be.

Next, the current tax compromise extends unemployment payments for another thirteen months by means of borrowed money. There were no offsetting spending cuts. Again, more business as usual. The people let it be known forcefully that they were fed up with out of control deficity spending in Congress, yet only a month later, there they go again.

And the tax compromise is larded up with earmarks in the form of special tax breaks for such vital national interests as NASCAR and Hollywood.!! Unbelievable!!

I recommend that the Republicans come to their senses, quickly. The tax question should be in a bill addressing that alone. Let's have a debate and vote on the tax issue by itself, so the positions on whether or not taxes should be raised will be clear. Have that debate clearly; don't cloud it with other things thrown into the bill. If you can't do that now, then do it in January when you will have a big majority in the House, and increased numbers in the Senate.

If the Republicans continue with "business as usual", they will squander their big election win and probably put themselves into extinction by means of the rise of a third party that "gets it".

The Nanny-state's Work Is Never Done

2010-12-09T07:15:00.000-08:00

The government has been telling us for years about all the things we eat that are not good for us: fried foods, red meat, sweets, salt, etc. As soon as we fix one bad eating habit, we are informed by the government of yet another one. It never stops; we never reach a point where our diet is now OK. Their work is never done.

Here’s the latest effort by the nanny-state to protect us from our bad eating habits. Kids in San Francisco will no longer be able to get a toy with their Happy Meal. The city’s board of supervisors recently banned the inclusion of a toy with meals that they deem to be unhealthy. In other words, Happy Meals as we know them have been banned in SF. Really; I’m not making this up.

The wise solons in San Francisco have decided that those pernicious Happy Meals are killing our children because the meals are so unhealthy, with all of that fat and red meat and, well, lot’s of other bad stuff.

Those evil fast food restaurants go so far as to put toys in those deadly Happy Meals to lure unsuspecting children into wanting them, not caring a whit about the death and destruction being so wrought on the young, all in pursuit of PROFIT. It’s an outrage!!!

It’s as bad as the witch with the ginger bread house who lured Hansel and Gretel in, and then threw them in the oven for dinner.

And you parents are either so dumb about what’s going on or so complicit that you readily take your kids to these fast food places and happily buy them a Happy Meal!! Revolting. You’re a menace to your children, and the government has now stepped in to exercise oversight on you irresponsible parents.

Now that Happy Meals have been taken care of, what’s the next diet danger for kids? All of that “trick-or-treat” candy kids get on Halloween is also wrecking their health --------.

The nanny-state has been busily at work in other areas. They have also been telling us for decades how bad smoking is for our health. In order to combat this national health hazard, cigarette advertising was banned from radio and TV and billboards, warning labels were put on cigarette packs, public information campaigns were conducted, and the rate of smoking went down dramatically. (Except in Asia. Don’t ever go to a meeting in a small room with Korean businessmen, as I did many times. You’ll suffocate due to all of the smoke.)

But here again, the nanny-state’s work is never done. Reducing the rate of smoking wasn’t enough. After that was accomplished, the nannies switched to second hand smoke. In this next phase of the anti-smoking campaign, smoking was no longer a matter of personal choice where one could take the health risks if they so chose. No, we were told that smoking was not only bad for the smoker, but also bad for anyone who happened to be in the vicinity. Smokers became miscreants in the eyes of the nannies, and they had to be controlled, for the good of all. Planes and restaurants had to have “no smoking” sections, to protect the non-smoker from the smoker. And it was done,

But even that wasn’t enough. The nannies then told us we had to ban smoking in planes and restaurants and public building all together. And it was done.

Still the problem wasn’t fixed. Next, entire college campuses and office complexes and shopping malls had to become “smoke free”, to protect passers-by from the slightest whiff of drifting smoke.

The war on smoking is another example of how the nanny-state’s work is never done. No matter how extreme the measures are that are taken in response to some issue, we later learn that it’s not enough; more must be done.

The same is true with gasoline mileage for cars. One may reasonably ask what legitimate right the government has to dictate how efficient the cars we drive must be, but that’s a different issue. The point here is that miles-per-gallon requirements were set for cars, and they were achieved. But, now it’s not enough. We continually hear how congress wants ever more stringent mileage requirements. The problem is never solved. No matter how high the mpg of modern cars is, it’s not adequate. More must be done; mpg must go even higher. Eventually, we must be forced to switch to electric cars. The nanny-state’s work is never done.

I could go on and on. Air pollution: Much has been done over the past decades to clean up the air, but, again, it’s never enough. New boogie-men must continually be found, the latest for the air being CO2 (green house gasses). And you can bet that even if harsh CO2 rules and regulations are put in place, it won’t fix the problem in the eyes of the nannies. Once CO2 emissions are reduced, or if the CO2 boogie-man just goes away, a new air pollution problem will then be found, and the whole cycle will start anew.

How about guns? Alcohol? Same story.

The nanny-state mentality is very dangerous to freedom. These people do not believe in “live and let live”; they believe in “live according to our dictates”.

If the nannies are vegetarians because they think that is a healthier diet, they feel compelled to force everyone else to become a vegetarian also. If they ride a bike to work in order to reduce their “carbon footprint”, then others should do likewise. If they want to use squiggly light bulbs to save energy, then a law needs to be passed forcing you and I to get rid of incandescent bulbs. If they recycle, so must we. Etc, etc, etc.

The lesson here is to be aware of what is going on, and to oppose the expansion of the nanny-state.

Jessee Ring
Nov. 29, 2010

Obama Finally Gets It On Unemployment And Agrees With Me

2010-12-07T08:34:00.000-08:00

You may remember from the primary/convention campaign last spring that I kept saying that government doesn't create jobs, private enterprise does. I said that businesses large and small in a free economy are where jobs come from, and if the government wants to create jobs, it should reduce the tax-disincentive to businesses for hiring by reducing the payroll tax. I said that many times.

After one failed "stimulus" after another, Obama has finally seen the light and now agrees with me. In the tax rate extension deal he has proposed, he included a provision to reduce the payroll tax (albeit temporarily) as a jobs-creation move!!!

If he had listened to me months ago, we could have saved the tax payers all those trillions of wasted "stimulus" which pushed the unemployment up not down. If he had listened at that time, we could have reduced the payroll tax way back then which would have brought unemployment down by now, thus increasing tax revenues, helping the economy, and saving the government money by not having to pay out so much in unemployment benefits (which have also been extended yet again in the tax rate deal). The problem would have been solved by now, if he had listened back then.

But better late than never.

Obama On How To Reduce Unemployment

2010-12-03T11:34:00.000-08:00

Today I heard President Obama say that unemployment payments need to be extended, yet again, because it will help the economy and thus reduce unemployment.

Is this man sane?

This is not rocket science; it's actually pretty simple. The way to bring unemployment down is to have fewer people be unemployed. That happens when they get a job - when they become employed. Jobs come from businesses large and small when they hire people. So, to creat jobs and thereby reduce unemployment, we need to create an economic environment wherein businesses can prosper and grow and hire people. Is it really so hard to understand this?

The unemployed need a job, not another handout.

But yet here we have the President of the United States actually saying that the way to reduce unemployment is to keep the unemployed on the government dole for as long as possible.

2012 is coming.

Death Panels Already In Operation

2010-12-01T12:50:00.000-08:00

Do you remember back during the discussion on Obamacare when Sarah Palin said that it would lead to death panels? The supporters of the government takeover of health care went nuts. The said there absolutely would not be any death panels, Sarah was an idiot and had no idea what she was talking about, how could she be so stupid, etc., etc., etc.

I have news: The death panels are already here.

There is a new drug out for the treatment of advance prostate cancer. It has been shown to increase life by an average of four months in such patients. But, the drug is expensive; the treatment for the four months costs about $100,000, or $25,000 per month.

A Medicare panel is deciding whether or not Medicare will cover the use of this drug.

Now, $25,000 per month is expensive. A person in that situation, however, might think it was worth it. But the decision of whether such patients get to live for four additional months is not going to be made by the patient and his family, or the patient and his doctor, or even the patient and some evil insurance company. No, this decision is being made by a bunch of nameless, faceless, unaccountable bureaucrats buried deep in the Medicare labyrinth. A death panel, in other words.

Just try to get in touch with them to express your opinion, and see how far you get.

The death panels are already here.

Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Thanksgiving Proclamation

2010-11-24T13:55:00.000-08:00

“The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God. In the midst of a civil war of unequalled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defense, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle, or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and mines, as well or iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battlefield, and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom.

No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidable engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and Union.”
Abraham Lincoln
Oct. 3, 1863

George Washington’s 1789 Thanksgiving Proclamation

2010-11-24T13:52:00.000-08:00

“Whereas it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly implore His protection and favor, and Whereas both Houses of Congress have, by their joint committee, requested me to ‘recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness:’

Now, therefore, I do recommend and assign Thursday, the 26th. day of November next, to be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be; that we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to their becoming a nation; for the signal and manifold mercies and the favorable interpositions of His providence in the course and conclusion of the late war; for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty which we have since enjoyed; for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been able to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and, in general, for all the great and various favors which He has been pleased to confer upon us.

And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech Him to pardon our national and other transgressions; to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually; to render our National Government a blessing to all the people by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed; to protect and guide all sovereigns and nations (especially such as have shown kindness to us), and to bless them with good governments, peace, and concord; to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the increase of science among them and us; and, generally to grant unto all mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as He alone knows to be best.”

Given under my hand, at the city of New York, the 3rd day of October, A.D 1789
G. Washington

A Letter To My Friend Morgan Griffith

2010-11-19T16:25:00.000-08:00

Dear Morgan,
Last Spring, you and I were candidates for the Republican nomination to run against the Democrat incumbent for the Ninth District congressional seat. I campaigned against you in that primary campaign, and during the course of that campaign, you and I went to many meetings throughout the Ninth District. I feel that I got to know you.

My friend Morgan, you won that Ninth District primary campaign and became the Republican nominee. Now you have also won the general election and are our new Congressman-elect. I give you my heartiest congratulations; you worked hard, stayed on the issues, and ran good campaigns.

You will be going to Washington soon. I am glad that you and many other newly elected Congressmen will be there on a mission to get our country headed back in the right direction.

Morgan, I hope you won’t think it presumptuous of me to humbly give you some suggestions to consider once you get to work in Washington.

First and foremost, make every decision as though you are planning to serve only one term. Do what is best for the country, even if it is not easy or popular. Follow your conscience, not the vagaries of the polls or political winds. In fact, never look at a poll or a newspaper. Don’t do anything for the purpose of getting re-elected.

Next, be available to us, not the Washington insiders and lobbyists. We want to be able to meet with you face-to-face if we have an issue or concern. This is a matter on which we have had strong feelings over the years.

Do not strive for acceptance by the Washington insiders and self-appointed elites. Shun them. Remain an outsider. If these self-appointed Washington elites ostracize you or worse, wear it as a badge of honor. Remain one of us, Morgan; do not let yourself become one of them.

Similarly, do not curry favor with party bosses. Remember that you work for us, not them. Think not of committee memberships or chairmanships or a better office or other such accouterments of career politicians. Don’t be concerned with getting onto the A-list for Washington social circle parties. Draw your strength from us, the people of the Ninth District.

Listen to Harry Truman’s advice: Walk softly and carry a big stick. That’s good advice for a newcomer to Washington with tough fights ahead; “give ‘em hell, Harry” knew something about that. When necessary, be ready, willing, and able to emphatically say “take a hike” to those who will try to pressure or intimidate you into doing their bidding. My friend, you were not elected because we want someone in DC to” go along to get along”. We’ve already had that, and in this last election we said loudly that we want a new approach. We want you to clean house in Washington. As we discussed at our breakfast meeting before the election, be the Morgan Earp of the posse that the people are sending to DC in January to clean up Dodge. Kick butt and take names.

Remember always the issues that got you elected and our desires on them: no cap and tax – no way, no how; total repeal of Obamacare; stop out of control government spending; reduce the deficit by spending less; reverse an ever expanding, ever more intrusive government; be strongly anti-abortion; win the war on terror; reduce unemployment by stimulating businesses large and small via reduced regulations and cuts in business taxes; extend all the Bush tax cuts permanently; adherence to the Constitution; promote American patriotism; promote traditional family values. We expect bold action on all of these, not nibbling around the edges. Fight hard, and never give up.

Finally, my friend, gird thyself mentally to do battle. It’s going to be a knock down, drag out fight when you and the other newcomers try to right the ship of state. But we have confidence that you are the right person for the job, and that you will prevail.

Now go. We will keep you and America in our prayers. Please let us know how we can help you.

Sincerely,
Jessee Ring

When Is A Situation Where Taxes Stay The Same Actually A Cut

2010-11-17T14:01:00.000-08:00

There is a furious debate going on in Washington now about whether or not to extend the so-called Bush tax cuts beyond their scheduled expiration date of Dec. 31.

There are three possible outcomes from this debate:

Scenario #1. Outcome: Congress does nothing. Effect: Everyone's taxes go up due to the expiration of the lower rates

Scenario #2. Outcome: Congress extends all the current tax rates. Effect: Everyone's taxes stay the same.

Scenario #3. Outcome: Congress extends some of the current tax rates, but not others. Effect: Some people's taxes stay the same, and other people see a tax increase.

In no case is anyone going to get a tax cut. Let me repeat: No one, come January, will pay less tax than they now are.

So why are Republicans letting the left-wing liberals frame this debate as one of whether or not the "rich" should get a tax cut? This is incredible ineptitude on the part of the Republicans. Why do they always let the liberals set the rules for the debate, on everything. Don't the Republicans get the meaning of the last election? Apparently not, so I will tell them: We're mad as hell, and we're not going to take it anymore. We are sick and tired of being sick and tired of Washington. We want some new blood in there that will fight, fight, fight for America's first principles. We didn't send you there to join the club; we sent you there to kick butt and take names.

So, Republicans, don't debate phantom tax cuts for the rich. Instead, nail the liberal's pants to the wall by showing how they think that they own all of the people's money. Show how the left wing liberals think that when they deign not to raise our taxes, they have actually given us a tax cut. Expose the libs for what they are: arrogant, egocentric, condescending elitists who think that they are our rulers. Go after them!!

2012 Is Coming

2010-11-13T14:38:00.000-08:00

I have been making this prediction informally for months; now I will make it public. In 2012, Hillary challenges Obama for the Democrat Presidential nomination, and gets it.

Shut up and Listen

2010-11-08T12:26:00.000-08:00

President Obama and other Democrat leaders have concluded that the reason they got their clock cleaned in the election is not because the people rejected their policies, but rather because the Democrats communicated poorly on those policies. People just didn't understand how wonderful the policies were. No, it wasn't the policies; it was the message. Now the Democrats plan to continue full speed ahead, but do a better job of explaining things.

Let me translate this for you. Obama and Pelosi and Reid think that all you local yokels out therein in "fly over land" are too stupid to be able to run your own life, so they have to do it for you. And since you hayseeds are so stupid, you also can't understand why their policies are good for you. You're just too dumb to be able to fathom it all.

Now the Democrats are going to do things differently. Henceforth, they will explain things to you on a first grade level so you can, hopefully, understand, and then you will support them and their policies. In addition, once you have been properly explained to, you will no doubt see Obama-Pelosi-Reid as the just and righteous rulers that they actually are. Your job is to shut and listen, and then vote for them.

Radford (VA) Prefers Quality of Voters to Quantity

2010-10-29T07:21:00.000-07:00

The Radford City Council with the support of the Radford School Board has recently decided to keep city council and school board elections in May instead of piggy-backing them onto the November elections. One of the major reasons given for keeping these elections in May, even though voter turnout is always low, is because “quality of voters” is preferred by city council and the school board to “quantity”. As it was explained, by holding these local elections in May, only people who are interested and informed will come out to vote, whereas if these local elections were held in November in conjunction with state and national elections, a lot of people might come out to vote for President and other offices, but these people may not be informed on the local issues and races. Quality of voters is preferred to quantity.

Let me translate this for you.

The Radford City Council and School Board are full of elitists who think ordinary people are too ignorant to be allowed to vote for or against them. The local yokels can vote for President of the United States, Congress, Governor of Virginia, the Virginia legislature, and whatever else, but God forbid these hayseeds who just fell off the turnip truck should be encouraged to vote for city council and school board seats. No, no, no. The Radford City Council and School Board are much too important to allow the vast unwashed masses to decide who will serve. Only the educated elites who study local issues intensely and who will make the effort to come out and vote in an obscure local election held in May should be allowed to make this vastly important decision. All you others can go vote for President of the United States, but you’re not to sully our city council and school board elections.

Most observers of the political scene decry low voter turnout as one of the biggest problems in elections. Many proposals have been made to increase voter turnout, such as mail-in ballots, holding elections on Saturday, making registration easier, and others. Regardless of the merits of these ideas, the intent is good: Increase voter turnout. Yet here we have the Radford City Council and School Board taking steps that they fully admit are for the specific purpose of perpetuating a low voter turnout!

The real reason for this is not because of some high minded concern for the civic good, it’s so the elitists on city council and the school board can more easily pack the polls with their cronies and supporters thereby ensuring them a permanent job.

Vast Left Wing Conspiracy

2010-10-26T11:35:00.000-07:00

There have been a lot of predictions lately from the chattering class (pundits, news analysts, commentators, political strategists, talking heads, and the like) about big Republican gains in the election next week. I think it's all a vast left-wing conspiracy to suppress voter turn-out among conservatives by building a false sense of security among those folks regarding the outcome of the election. The plan is that if conservatives can be made to feel overconfident and hence complacent, maybe they'll just stay home on election day, since the results are a foregone conclusion.

Don't fall for it!! Get out and vote no matter what on November 2nd!

It's Our Money

2010-10-18T06:25:00.000-07:00

The next time you see a picture in the paper of a Congressman giving local officials a federal government check for a water treatment plant or a new fire truck or a senior center or some such thing, I want you to remember one thing: It’s our money.

A lot of people get the impression that if Washington pays for something, it’s free. Local officials and groups are constantly filling out grant requests or lobbying their congressman to get funds for various local projects. If they are successful and get the funds, it seems as though the money is free since it doesn’t come from local budgets. But it’s not free. This is because the federal government doesn’t have any money of its own; the only money Congress has is money that it has previously taken from us in the form of taxes.

So it’s all our money. We are paying for that water treatment plant, fire truck, etc. even if the check comes from Washington.

We would be a lot better off to stop sending so much of our money to Washington and then having to beg a nameless, faceless bureaucrat up there to give us some of it back again. We would be a lot better off to keep that tax money right here at home and let local officials decide how to best use it.

Similar discernment is appropriate when listening to the discussion on federal tax law come January first. That’s when the so-called Bush tax cuts will expire, unless Congress acts to the contrary. The discussion that we hear in the alphabet networks is cast in the context of tax cuts being enacted by Congress if they extend the Bush era tax policy.

Reality is that if current federal tax policy is maintained in its entirety, i.e. the Bush tax cuts are all extended, the result will be that no one will get a tax cut come January 1. What would happen under that scenario is that everyone’s taxes will remain unchanged. Yet in hidebound left wing ideological minds, when taxes remain the same for everyone, somehow it’s a tax cut for the wealthy.

The current discussion on taxes come January 1 is not about cutting taxes, it’s about whose taxes may be increased! Obama and friends want to increase taxes on those making over $250K per year, that segment of the economy that includes many small businesses. He doesn’t tell you that small businesses create over 70% of all jobs in this country. So in an economy where unemployment is stuck at about 9.5%, Obama and the Democrats want to single out that segment of the economy that creates the bulk of all jobs for punishment via a tax increase! Unbelievable!

Another reality is that the vast majority of economists agree that raising taxes on anyone in the midst of a fragile, slowly recovering economy such as we are now experiencing is a very bad idea. Yet somehow this extremely relevant piece of information doesn’t get into the discussion when liberals talk about taxes. The reason is that it doesn’t fit into the their preconceived template on the topic of taxes, so it is simply ignored.

Left wing liberals think that the government owns all of your earnings, and if the government lets you keep some of what you earn, then they are giving it to you. Once again, it’s very enlightening to remember that it’s our money! We worked for it, we earned it, and it’s ours, including the high income earners. The government has no money of its own; it only has what it takes from us in taxes. When the government takes less of our money in taxes, we are simply keeping our own money.
It’s our money.

Jessee Ring Takes On The Roanoke Times

2010-10-10T12:30:00.000-07:00

Here is a copy of a recent editorial in the infamous Roanoke Times, and my respsonse to it. Click on the image to see a larger, more readable format of it.

The Ruling Class Verses The People

2010-09-29T09:00:00.000-07:00

The election in November has morphed into something beyond a typical election. This election is no longer about Democrats verses Republicans, or conservatives verses liberals; it has turned into a battle of the ruling elite verses the people.

We hear a lot of talk about an anti-incumbent mood in the country, and that is part of what’s going on, but by no means all of it. There is something much more profound and fundamental taking place.

The first indication was the tea partiers.

I have attended a couple of tea party rallies, and several aspects of them struck me as highly unusual in the world of assemblies of the citizens.

One thing that especially got my attention was the large number of people at these events who said something to the effect of, “I’ve never done anything like this before. I’ve never gone to a public rally or spoken out before, but now I feel compelled to do so.” This is very significant; people who have never before been involved are now actively speaking out, and in large numbers. They feel that the country is heading in the wrong direction, that Washington isn’t listening, and that things are so dire that they cannot remain silent.

There have been many tea party rallies and others that are similar throughout the country, some small and some attracting hundreds of thousands of people. The response from the ruling class has been disdain and arrogance. Members of the ruling class on the Democrat side denigrated the tea partiers, calling them Astroturf, hatemongers, Nazis, etc. Then the ruling class went about its business as usual. Nothing in Washington changed.

The next development was the elections last November in which governors in Virginia and New Jersey were elected after campaigning on the need for a bold new direction in those states. And they didn’t just win, they won big. Governor McDonnell received more votes than any candidate for governor in Virginia ever. The ruling class started to get miffed because their candidates were not being elected.

Then a special election was held in Massachusetts to fill the U.S. Senate seat formerly held by Ted Kennedy. The unthinkable happened. An unknown by the name of Scott Brown defeated the ruling class’s anointed candidate.

After that came the primary election season, and the populist eruptions were everywhere. Sharon Angle won the Republican primary in Nevada over the party insider who was supported by the establishment. The ruling class turned on Ms. Angle and started ridiculing her. In the general election, she is now running against that paragon of the ruling class, Harry Reid, and polls show the race tied. Still the ruling class has not forgiven her.

There were similar results in South Carolina (Nikki Haley) and Florida (Marco Rubio) where political newcomers defeated party establishment types in a primary election.

In Alaska, it became even more pronounced. Another unknown and political neophyte, Joe Miller, won the Republican primary against a sitting U. S. Senator who, in true ruling class fashion, was appointed to the position by her father, the governor at the time, to fill a vacancy. The ruling class had a fit.

Then in Delaware, the earth moved. Christine O’Donnell, a person who to say was an atypical candidate is an understatement, defeated yet another ruling class crowned prince in the senate primary election on the Republican side. Now the political elites became truly outraged. How dare these commoners reject their directions on who should be the nominee! Who do they think they are? Republican Great High Exalted PoohBah Karl Rove threw a hissy fit on national TV. Pundit extraordinaire Charles Krauthammer pontificated on how stupid the people were being because they didn’t do what he thought they should in the primary. The National Republican Senatorial Committee (the group that tries to get Republicans elected to the U.S. Senate) said they would not support Ms. O’Donnell (and then quickly reversed course and said they would). The various courtiers in the ruling class started yelping about how she was unelectable, fatally flawed, had never accomplished anything, blah, blah, blah.

And now here we are today with about six weeks until election day, and the ruling class still doesn’t get it. After eighteen months of messages being delivered in a variety of manners and in no uncertain terms, they have gone into denial or self-protection mode or adopted an attitude of “let them eat cake”.

It has truly become the people verses the ruling class. Continuing with their elitist ruling class entitlement mentality will have severe consequences for both the Democrats and the Republicans.

Since the Democrats are currently in power in Washington, they risk losing control of Congress and then losing the Presidency.

For the Republicans, the danger of ignoring this movement of the people is more insidious. If the Republican party establishment pays lip service to the peoples’ candidates, or out rightly opposes them, they risk further alienating the people to the point that there may well be a third party formed. If, on the other hand, the party establishment gets behind the peoples’ candidates and they get elected, it will mean the Republicans will have to be ready to take on a new identity and adopt a new mode of governance. Are they willing and able to do that?

Jessee Ring
Sept. 20, 2010

The Sky Didn't Fall - Again

2010-09-20T07:52:00.000-07:00

Did you hear the latest on the great Gulf oil spill? It's gone - the oil, I mean. They can't find any more oil in the Gulf, on beaches, on birds, or anywhere. Even the so-called "plume" of oil that was supposedly lurking deep down in the ocean somewhere can't be found. Nothing, no oil, it's all just gone. Shrimp fishing has resumed; everything is going back to the way it was.

This oil leak was billed by the hysterical alphabet networks and government agencies as the worst ecological disaster ever. Nothing like it had ever occurred before. The Valdez spill was a pittance compared to this. Oil was going to decimate the Gulf beaches, marshes, fishing industries, and tourist industry. That wasn’t going to be all; it was going to get worse. Oil was going to flow into the Gulfstream, come around the Florida peninsula, and foul all the beaches along the East Coast. Nothing would be safe. The world would never be the same.

And now it’s all just gone. There’s no comment on this from all of the former chicken littles; their silence is deafening.

On another front, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) recently announced that the H1N1 swine flu pandemic is officially over. To which I say, “Did it ever start?” Here’s another one where the government and media were hysterical about something that was going to run rampant and kill most of us. I’m sure you remember hearing about that last spring. Once the virus had made the “species jump” to humans, we were told, it would likely mutate, and then we would be defenseless. Hundreds of thousand, if not millions, of people would die. It was going to be the black plague all over again, where every night people threw the dead bodies out into the street, and the next morning carts came around to pick them up to be hauled off to the incinerators. With our swine flu, a barely tested H1N1 vaccine was rushed to doctors and clinics. In an apparent effort to inflate the statistics, government rules were issued requiring that anyone who saw a doctor or nurse with so much as a runny nose was counted as a case of swine flu. Even so, the numbers stayed small. The cataclysm didn’t happen. Once again, it was much ado about nothing. No swine flu pandemic, no disaster, no nothing. By the way, all those vaccines are now being destroyed.

Global warming is another one. It’s the same template: Some occurrence will happen that triggers unstoppable disastrous events resulting in the end of the world as we know it, unless the government intervenes in a massive way to prevent it. There is the same institutional efforts to fudge the numbers to prove that it will or is happening. We heard about the world climate data being fudged and doctored, about anecdotal evidence from extreme environmental groups that have an agenda being touted as accepted scientific fact, about dissenting views being squelched, efforts to gin up hysteria (Al Gore et al), etc. And no matter what the weather is, we’re told it’s due to global warming. The polar icecaps were supposedly melting due to global warming, but last winter when we had a very cold winter all over North America including several blizzards, that too, we were told, was due to global warming. It was upsetting the weather patterns, you see. So no matter what happens weather wise, it’s said to be proof of global warming.

This global warming thing reminds me of the “Pinky And The Brain” episode where, one night, their daily “plan to take over the world” consisted of melting the polar ice caps. First, they would buy up all real estate in the world above the fifteenth story in buildings. Then, they would stow away on a space shuttle flight, make their way to the Hubble space telescope, redirect it so that it acted as a huge reverse magnifying glass, aim it at the Earth’s poles, and melt all the ice. The seas would rise to the fourteenth floor, per their calculations. Then all of their real estate from the fifteenth floor up would be worth a bazillion dollars, and they would control the world.

Global warming is Al Gore’s version of this.

Then there was the prediction a few years ago of a great Y2K (Year Two Thousand) meltdown. You remember that one, don't you? The world as we know it was going to cease to function at midnight on Dec. 31,1999 when the date rolled over to DD/MM/00. This "end of the world" scare was going to happen as a result of all the computers in the world malfunctioning because they wouldn't be able to distinguish between the years 1900 and 2000, since they both end in 00. Airplanes would crash, banks would lose track of our money, medical records would be unsearchable, all government functions would come to a grinding halt, etc., etc., etc. Then, year 2000 came, and everything went on as normal without so much as a glitch.

Where are all the oil spill and swine flu doom-sayers now? Have they apologized for their ignorance and promised to be more skeptical and questioning next time, that is, to be real journalist? Are they being laughed off of the public stage? No, they are off to the next scare, which has something to do with hungry bears in Yellowstone Park getting ready to eat people, I think.

Emergency Room Wait Times

2010-09-03T06:02:00.000-07:00

I’ve noticed some strange messages on billboards in our area: Hospitals are advertising their emergency room (ER) wait times.
Pulaski Community Hospital and Montgomery Regional Hospital have put up some big signs showing their emergency room wait times, in real time. The big billboards have lights that form numbers indicating the current wait time. The last time I drove by, the sign was showing a 14 minute emergency room wait time. They also have signs telling us that we can text them to get the latest wait time. Yes, you can text in to get the emergency room wait time, kind of like texting the bank to get your account balance.

This is very odd. Why would hospitals advertise their emergency room wait times? Why would anyone care what the ER wait time is?

When I called the hospital administrative office and asked about this, I was told that the reason for doing it is that they know people have choices, and they want to show that they are putting patients first. The person also explained that the wait times shown on the signs are a four hour rolling average.

Let’s think about this. If someone has a medical emergency, does the emergency room wait time matter to him? A person having a heart attack, for example, is not going to say, “Oh, the wait time is too long; I’ll go later, or maybe tomorrow.”

I can imagine the conversation. Husband: “Dear, I think I’m having a heart attack. I have bad chest pain, I’m sweating profusely, and there’s this funny feeling running down my arms to my fingertips. We’d better go to the emergency room.” Wife: “Let me text in for the wait time. Oh, look, there’s a long wait. Can you hold off awhile? We’ll go later when the line is shorter. Or I could check with the other hospital to see what their wait time is, if you want.”

No, you don’t do that; you go as fast as you possibly can.

And once you get there, it’s not “first come; first served.” The emergency room staff decides which cases are the most urgent, and those cases get treated first, while the less critical emergencies may have to wait awhile. I learned this first hand when my daughter was about four years old, fell and cut her forehead, and we went to the emergency room. Even though she had a bad gash, it wasn’t bleeding much, and we were told that other cases were more urgent, so we had to wait. Someone having a heart attack will go right in.

Yes, I know the whole story about the “uninsured” using emergency rooms for their primary care. When little uninsured Johnny has a fever, his parents take him to the emergency room, where all comers are required by law to be treated, no matter what.

And that was one of the major problems with the health care system. The uninsured were using the emergency room as their family doctor, clogging it up with routine cases, and having to wait for hours while the true emergencies were taken care of. Not only was this a problem because of the inefficiency, we were told, it was also a problem because of the expense.

Emergency rooms are very costly, and using them for non-emergencies made that care very expensive, pushing up costs for everyone. It was one of the major problems that was cited as to why we had to vastly overhaul the entire health care system. We had to get those routine cases out of the emergency room, so we wouldn’t bankrupt the system. Obamacare was going to fix all of this.

So, I ask again, why are hospitals, right now, advertising their emergency room wait times?

There can be only one reason. They must think that by advertising their wait time, they can entice more people into using the emergency room, and to use their ER instead of another one. But this only makes sense for non-emergency cases, where people have a choice of going now or later, or not at all.

The inescapable conclusion is that the hospitals putting up such signs are trying to attract as many non-emergency cases to their ER as possible.

There’s a skunk in the woodpile.

Here we have hospitals actively working to make the problem of abuse of the emergency room worse. They are actually promoting it! They apparently want to get as many of the uninsured as possible into their ER.

Then it must not be a problem. Forget everything you heard about the problem of the uninsured and the ER. Now that Obamacare has passed, we learn that it was not true.

Wait, could it be something else? Could it be ----- ? No, it couldn’t be that some of the obscure provisions in the 2400 page byzantine Obamacare bill are having unintended consequences. Maybe buried in there somewhere are some provisions regarding the uninsured that give hospitals a financial incentive for using the ER for routine cases. Could Obamacare have made this problem worse? Is that why we are starting to see those ER wait time signs?

Jessee Ring
Aug. 24, 2010

The Sky Was Falling

2010-08-30T11:16:00.000-07:00

Did you hear the latest on the oil spill? It's gone - the oil, I mean. They can't find any more oil in the Gulf, on beaches, on birds, or anywhere. Even the so-called "plume" of oil that was supposedly lurking deep down in the ocean somewhere can't be found. Nothing, no oil, it's all just gone. Shrimp fishing has resumed; everything is going back to the way it was.

This oil leak that was billed by hysterical alphabet networks as the worst ecological disaster ever has got to be the greatest none-event in decades. It's right up there with the Y2K computer meltdown that didn't happen.

You remember that one, don't you? The world as we know it was going to cease to function at midnight on Dec. 31,1999 when the date rolled over to DD/MM/00. This "end of the world" scare was going to happen as a result of all the computers in the world malfunctioning because they wouldn't be able to distinguish between 1900 and 2000 since they both end in 00. Airplanes would crash, banks would lose track of our money, all government functions would come to a grinding halt, etc., etc., etc. Then, year 2000 came, and everything went on as normal without a glitch. It was all "Chicken Little" hysteria.

The great Gulf oil spill was another one. As it turns out, almost nothing was affected.

Where are all the oil spill doom-sayers now? Have they apologized for their ignorance and promised to be more informed next time? Are they being laughed off of the public arena? No, they are off to the next scare, which has something to do with hungry bears in Yellowstone Park getting ready to eat people, I think.